


Ride Baby

by onnenlintu



Category: Stand Still Stay Silent
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-03-06
Updated: 2019-03-04
Packaged: 2019-03-28 00:09:10
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 22
Words: 45,868
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13892049
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/onnenlintu/pseuds/onnenlintu
Summary: Light-hearted modern AU. Contains long-haul trucking, bad sibling advice, 90's Norwegian black metal, tedious German landscapes, and jorts. Explicit chapters are marked.





	1. Ride Baby

**Author's Note:**

> This fic was written specifically for a friend of mine that I met because of thrash metal. That fact explains a lot about it. 
> 
> Every title except for interlude chapters is a Pansy Division song.
> 
> The setting is sometime in the summer of 2012.

It had seemed like such a good idea. Reynir's older brother had told him all about it, pointing him at "Hitchwiki" and various websites that made eating out of dumpsters sound incredibly practical as a diet choice. Sure, Bjarni had some bad ideas sometimes, like the time he'd tried to turn his hair into dreadlocks and ended up allergic to the mold that grew in them, or the time he had gotten fired from his summer job in the pharmacy for telling anyone who came in for paracetamol that they just needed "some decent dank". But he had seemed so confident when he told Reynir about how incredibly cheap it was to spend the summer in Europe if you made do with a combination of hitch-hiking, skip-diving and not being picky about exactly which country you ended up in. His arguments for Reynir starting his journey with a ferry to Denmark instead of a "planet-fucking" flight had been extremely persuasive at the time. Reynir had started to doubt how worth it that one was during the multi-hour stopover in the Faroe Islands. Tórshavn had smelled distinctly of cat pee, and even all the sheep there seemed a bit miserable. At least it had been possible to get an open return, so he knew how he was getting home again at the end of his adventure.  
  
Two days in, the return ticket in his pocket was the one bit of comfort Reynir had left. He had been doing so well, finding a ride that was going east within hours. He was going to go to Berlin first, and it was going to be so cool. He hadn't researched all that much before he decided on Berlin, but it had been enough to convince him that this was a place where cool people went to do cool things. Bjarni had been totally right and this was the best idea ever.  
  
When Reynir had woken up just east of the Polish border, his ride had shrugged and said he had felt bad waking him. "You will find a ride west. Everyone refuels on this side of the border before a long journey. It is cheaper this side." It had made sense. Reynir had been totally confident that the man's advice would work out when he had been dropped off at a service station. He hadn't realised that so few people spoke English in Poland. After a few hours trying to communicate the concept of hitch-hiking west to totally unreceptive drivers, he had realised he was extremely thirsty. Poland apparently got far hotter in the summer than Iceland did. Perhaps he should have bought sunscreen, because his T-shirt - one which had come with his _National Geographic_ subscription, and which he quite liked - was not saving his pale arms from anything. He had put his bag down outside while he went in to buy a drink, taking only one of the 20-euro notes he'd bought at the harbour. Ten minutes and one realisation that they didn't use euros in Poland later, he had come back to find his bag totally gone. Half an hour later than that, he realised with a sinking feeling that it had definitely not been handed in somewhere or moved to a safer spot by some nice person.  
  
Hours of panic ensued, Reynir getting more and more thirsty and desperate, and every possible ride back towards Denmark avoiding him more and more pointedly as he visibly lost it in the parking lot. He wandered in a daze to the side of the service station where the trucks were parked, knocking on the doors of the truck cabins. Hadn't Bjarni said that truckers were usually just happy to have company, and would pick up hitch-hikers for long stretches of their journey? Of the truckers that spoke English and were going west, every one of them informed him that because of the insurance regulations, people riding in their trucks needed to be accounted for and they could get fired for taking a hitch-hiker. One truck had a Danish number plate and Reynir stood in front of the empty cabin, feeling like he was probably hallucinating it out of hope. Not that he could have gotten a ride in it anyway, he guessed, even if the mystery trucker had been there to let him in.  
  
He found some złoty on the ground, but the only drink the change covered was some kind of beer. The fact that beer was the cheapest drink here was deeply surreal to the young Icelander. He made a mental note that he now had at least one wild story to tell people back home. Sitting down on the kerb, he cracked it open.  
  
Reynir had pictured this scene many times during his hours on Hitchwiki. Sitting on a kerb in some foreign country, drinking a beer, in the warmth of the late afternoon sun. The reality was sticky, and involved his arms peeling, and had a weird aftertaste. He had never felt so stupid in his entire life. Reynir had left his phone in his bag, so he had no way to contact his parents. He had effectively no money, and no way to get back to Denmark to use the ticket home that was his last hope. Fiddling with the end of his braid, he decided he was probably going to die out here. At this point, there was nothing holding him back from just starting to cry, so he did. People walking by began to eye him with regretful sympathy. He didn't blame them for not intervening. Everything from the tip of his hiking boots to his sunburned ears screamed that he'd absolutely done this to himself.  
  
"Hey. English?"  
  
Reynir looked up to see an extremely large man towering over him. His face was framed by fluffy blond muttonchops and despite the heat, he was wearing a sleeveless denim jacket that looked like it would never quite close over his slight beer gut. Through the thick hair on his arms, Reynir could see the slightly green-black outline of various tattoos.  
  
Reynir nodded. God, he must look pathetic.  
  
"What happened to you?" The man spoke very slowly, but with an accent that sounded almost perfect. Reynir guessed that the speed was not so much due to the man speaking it poorly himself, but having no idea what to expect from this crying loser he'd found.  
  
"I um." Reynir paused, then the floodgates opened. "I thought I was going to have a good time hitchhiking, and I read about it, and I, I packed my stuff, but now my stuff is gone, and I need to get back to Denmark to get the ferry home, but nobody will take me, and I'm so thirsty, and I'm going to" - he had to pause to take a deep breath - "I'm going to die and my mum will never know what happened."  
  
Several more deep breaths, then he tried his best to smile. "But um, enough about me! How's your day going?"  
  
The man looked at Reynir like he had just told him he was getting secret dispatches from the moon people. "Where are you from?"  
  
"Iceland."  
  
"Oh. I should have guessed." Reynir didn't know what that was meant to mean, but it sounded like it wasn't a huge compliment. The man was looking at him with a mix of pity and frustration. "Denmark, you say."  
  
"Yeah. I have a ticket for the ferry from there."  
  
"Why the hell are you getting the ferry?"  
  
"Um. You know what, I don't think I know." He had been very sure he knew at some point, but Bjarni's extreme enthusiasm for the topic seemed very distant now.  
  
"And you're having no luck getting rides."  
  
Reynir nodded again. He wasn't sure what the point of this quiz on his stupid plan was, but it wasn't like he could argue with it. At least someone was talking to him.  
  
The man stroked his chin, looking calculating. "You know, it's a very slow death by dehydration. Takes weeks. Although the sunstroke might kill you first."  
  
Reynir just looked at his shoes. He hadn't known that it could take that long. "Is there any way to make it faster?" His lip trembled and he could feel he was starting to cry again.  
  
"Christ on a fucking bike." The man pinched the bridge of his nose. It felt a bit mean that he was reacting like this to Reynir learning about his imminent slow, painful death.  
  
"I'm _joking_. You're not going to die of exposure in a service station full of people. In fact, you're not going to die anywhere in Poland. I can take you back to Denmark."  
  
Reynir jumped up, spilling what was left of his beer on the floor. "Really?"  
  
"If you can deal with it taking a couple of weeks."  
  
Reynir was high on relief and agreed enthusiastically that this was fine, then paused for a moment. "My bag got stolen. I don't have two weeks of clean underwear."  
  
The man was again looking at him like he was mad. "Um, I'm sure I can work something out though." Reynir's apparent saviour nodded at his statement, his look of vague pity returning.  
  
The man turned out to be attached to the Danish truck Reynir had seen earlier, and the cabin inside was surprisingly roomy. "There's bunks in here!"  
  
The something-like-pity expression with which he regarded Reynir had barely changed throughout their whole interaction. "You've never seen the inside of a long-haul truck before, have you?"  
  
"No! It's so comfy!"  
  
"Yeah, the comfier they keep us the less they have to pay us. And sometimes you gotta take another driver somewhere, so yeah, two sleeping spots per cabin. You're going to have to move the bread stash out of the way to get those lanky legs in the bottom one, though."  
  
Apparently the way Reynir looked at the bread was obvious. "Have you eaten anything all day?"  
  
"No."  
  
"Eat something."  
  
"I can't pay you back for this."  
  
"Just take it. You look like you're made of twigs."  
  
Reynir tore into the pack of bread rolls, inhaling two of them as well as half a bottle of water he'd been offered, before realising he'd been incredibly rude. "Oh my god, I'm sorry. I never introduced myself. I'm Reynir."  
  
The man put down the sandwich he was making, leaned over from where he was sitting in the driver's seat, and shook Reynir's hand. His knuckles were as hairy as his arms and the grip of his huge hand was all-enveloping. "Mikkel Madsen, pleased to assist."


	2. Twinkie Twinkie Little Star

They had driven a little to the south and west that evening and bunked down for the night in a lay-by. The next morning, Mikkel finally gave Reynir some details of the route they could expect. Apparently they were going further southwest through Germany and Spain to Barcelona, after which they would head across to Portugal. Their return to Denmark would be back up through Spain and France, then through Belgium, the Netherlands, and Germany. When Mikkel had got out a smartphone to show Reynir more or less the way they were going, Reynir had swallowed his awkwardness and asked if he could use it for a moment. He had typed out an apologetic but hopefully reassuring email to his mum, explaining that he wouldn't have reliable contact for the rest of his journey, but that he had a solid plan to get back to Denmark. Mikkel seemed to find the sight of him simultaneously trying to use another person's phone and puzzling over the least anxiety-inducing wording incredibly amusing.  
  
They passed the German border and Mikkel turned on the radio. The song playing was one Reynir had heard pretty much every time he'd been near a radio in the past week, although that hadn't been a great many. He guessed it had come out sometime in the past fortnight, because it sounded pretty new to him. Mikkel had groaned. "This fucking song!"  
  
"What's wrong with it?" Reynir had asked.  
  
"Ask me that question again in 4 hours."  
  
"Aw, it's not bad! It's not great, sure, but it's catchy." He began to sing along to the refrain of " _Hey, I just met you, and this is crazy..._ " and was abruptly silenced by Mikkel threatening, in a tone of worrying seriousness, to throw him out of the moving vehicle if he continued.  
  
The road between the Polish border and their first stop didn't seem to go past many landmarks. Reynir had remarked on the relative lack of scenery and just gotten a laugh. "Please don't tell me you came from Iceland to Germany for the scenery." Reynir had not, but he was still surprised to see how dull the landscape was. Fields turned to the edges of towns to fields again, little in the way of even hills in sight. It was weird to think that this was probably what most countries looked like. He had been logically aware of why so many tourists came to Iceland, but it was interesting to realise for himself why such an amount of them tended to clog up the road near the family farm. Compared to this, the perfectly normal Icelandic view there would have been stunning.  
  
Although there weren't any mountains to mark the truck's passage over land, the voice and patter on the radio did change every now and again as different local stations faded in and out of range. Even through the fact that he didn't speak German, Reynir felt like it was quite noticable that all the stations were quite diverse, except for the constant thread of that one song binding them together. It bulldozed all the usual barriers that seperated radio content. He started to sort of see why Mikkel hated this song.  
  
As they pulled into the Dresden services, a radio station that appeared to be largely men talking in very fast German once again started to play it. Reynir groaned. "Not this one again!"  
  
Mikkel reached over and turned off the radio, looking smug. "You see?"  
  
"Did you keep the radio on all the way to Dresden just to get me to agree with you?"  
  
"Yes."  
  
Reynir had bought him lunch anyway with the 20 euros he had in his pocket. It was the least he could do for the man who was apparently going to drive him around for the next two weeks. "Is this your only money?" Mikkel had asked halfway through devouring the diner lunch.  
  
"Uh. Yes."  
  
Mikkel had once again given him the look one might give a particularly slow child trying to do a puzzle. "That wasn't necessary. I appreciate it. But you're being ridiculous."  
  
Once they were back in the truck, Mikkel sat back and opened the laptop that had been stashed to the side of his bunk. "Can't go again for a bit. My breaks have to be a certain length, EU regulations." Before this trip, Reynir had not had a clue about how many different rules applied to the times and ways in which one could drive a truck. Mikkel continued. "Might as well put some decent music on though, now that I've made my point. Napalm Death?"  
  
"Uh."  
  
"Come on, you're Icelandic. You must like some kind of rock music."  
  
"I had a Cradle of Filth phase when I was like, 13. Or well, I tried to. I don't think I ever managed to like it."  
  
Mikkel had laughed at that one, for slightly longer than Reynir appreciated. "What, were you just sat there listening to _Invoking the Unclean_ and trying really hard to ignore that it sucks?"  
  
"Uh, I think it was called _Nymphetamine_. I remember I got it when it came out and decided it must be cool because of the album art." That was an embarrassing admission, probably, but it wasn't like Reynir had come into this situation looking extremely cool.  
  
"Fuck _off_. Were you really 13 when that piece of garbage came out? Jesus Christ, I feel ancient."  
  
Reynir wasn't sure what to reply to that. "Why do you know when all their albums came out if they're garbage?"  
  
"Oh, we toured with them back in the day. So it's, you know, in the grapevine."  
  
Despite being officially many years over his phase, Reynir sat up at that. "Really?"  
  
"Oh yeah. Not anything big. We were the first support on an early tour." Mikkel went on to tell a story about being in some kind of band that Reynir had never even heard of the genre of and being apparently well acquainted enough with Dani Filth to sell him drugs. "I liked to, you know, mess with him a little. When he came to buy speed off me I'd chase him with an axe and pretend to be having a mental breakdown. He came back for more. Three times. That man is an idiot." Reynir thought about the poster he'd never taken down from his room at home and filed away this enlightening information. After the way Mikkel had messed with him yesterday and, in a way, all morning, he wasn't sure if he believed it. It was certainly quite a story.  
  
The afternoon's driving was at least slightly more interesting, Reynir being entrusted with the laptop and typing out the names of any artists Mikkel decided he needed to listen to. Reynir wasn't sure about most of them, but he did feel like by the time they were nearing Nuremberg he had a far greater appreciation for the variety of weird, shouty music that had been produced since the early 90s. He supposed that was another thing that counted as a travel experience.  
  
The Nuremberg break passed, and they set off again. Reynir started to relax a little. This wasn't so bad, and he could see himself spending a couple of weeks like this. Mikkel's stories were varied and entertaining when they came out, as they seemed to often in the course of rambling about whatever music he'd assigned Reynir to put on. He did genuinely seem to appreciate the company, and Reynir shared when he was asked, telling him about growing up on a sheep farm in the Westfjords, his course on heritage sheep breeds at the rural college, and his many siblings. Mikkel was one of the few people he'd met with even more of those than him. It was nice to commiserate about the experience of being in a large family, although Mikkel's opinions about the "wiles" of all youngest siblings seemed a little unfair.  
  
Finally, at a service station somewhere closer to Stuttgart than Nuremberg, they pulled in for the night. It was a relatively small place, although it bore a striking resemblence to every other German service station Reynir had seen so far. As they were getting ready for bed, there had been a knock on the driver's side door, and Mikkel had opened it. Leaning onto the dashboard to see past Mikkel, Reynir had seen an extremely hopeful-looking young man standing there and holding a sign that said BARCELONA. Mikkel had started to tell him that both of them were about to bed down for the night when Reynir had chipped in with "Hey, we're going to Barcelona! We could take this guy in the morning!"  
  
Mikkel had not been hugely receptive. "We don't have enough space to sleep three in the truck."  
  
The hopeful person had grinned broadly. "Oh, that's okay! We have a tent." His golden blond hair and accent made Reynir think he must be some kind of Scandinavian, although the way he spoke was mixed enough with a copied-from-TV Americanisation that it was hard to place it exactly. Reynir noticed that he was dressed quite nicely. His skinny jeans fit much better than the ones Reynir himself wore, although his shirt seemed kind of small. He had one of those haircuts that was all long on the top and cut away underneath, as well as a lot of earrings. The slight roundness to his face and big, blue eyes made it look like he couldn't have been any older than Reynir was.  
  
"What do you mean 'we' have a tent?" Mikkel looked increasingly miffed about the prospect of taking this guy.  
  
"Oh, um. I have a friend with me. But honestly, he doesn't take up much space. And he's quiet."  
  
Reynir started to feel slightly awkward about taking away the easiest lie Mikkel could have told to get rid of any hopeful hitch-hikers. This guy was so persistent.  
  
Mikkel sighed. "Let's see your friend." He pronounced the last word with some kind of intonation Reynir really couldn't discern.  
  
The blond guy had turned off to the side and yelled through cupped hands. "Lalli! I found us a ride!"  
  
"You have not found yourself a ride yet, Goldilocks." Mikkel had reminded him. When "Lalli" eventually trotted into view, he turned out to also look incredibly Nordic, although that was where the resemblence ended. This one had ash-blond hair halfway down his back and a shirt covered in incomprehensible writing. Despite the summer heat, he was wearing his camo cargo pants tucked into very solid-looking Army Surplus boots. He nodded at Reynir and Mikkel without saying a word. Reynir couldn't tell at all if the darkness around his eyes was 2000s throwback or tiredness.  
  
"So this is Lalli. And you are?" Mikkel had addressed the first one.  
  
"Emil!" He smiled and extended his hand. Mikkel shook it, and instead of introducing himself in return asked "How long have you two been travelling together?"  
  
"Uhh. Since Sweden. He started off in Finland."  
  
Mikkel looked between the two of them. "I see. I might as well take you on to Barcelona."  
  
"Yes!" Emil did a tiny victory dance. "We've been waiting here for ages, you have no idea. Lalli, did you set our tent up yet?" His friend had again just nodded, so Emil had turned back to Mikkel. "When should we come find you in the morning?"  
  
"About eight, I suppose."  
  
Emil had nodded with great enthusiasm. "Yep! We'll be there!"  
  
Once the door was closed, Mikkel had raised his eyes to heaven and sighed with the slightest hint of melodrama. "Two days of four people in here. I'm far too nice to you idiots."


	3. Headbanger

The two newcomers had turned up at exactly 8 in the morning, both wearing backpacks. While they were getting themselves arranged in the space behind the seats where Reynir had been sleeping, Emil had paused. "Lalli, did you take your travel sickness pills?"  
  
Mikkel's face, usually calm no matter the topic, showed some faint alarm. "Do not tell me he's going to be sick in my truck."  
  
Emil had waved his hands and smiled appeasingly. "No, it'll be fine! He's fine if he takes something." He looked at Lalli. "You took them, right?"  
  
Lalli nodded. He still hadn't said a single word. Mikkel had told him in no uncertain terms that if he was sick in there, there would be consequences he could not imagine. Lalli just listened to his threats and made a small "mm-hmm" of understanding before curling up on his side and closing his eyes once the truck started moving. If Lalli's friend hadn't been clearly interacting with him in English, Reynir would have been starting to suspect he didn't actually speak the language Mikkel was lecturing him in. From his position riding shotgun, he twisted around and contemplated the weird pair. "So how did you two end up travelling together? You said he came over from Finland?"  
  
At least Emil was somewhat talkative. "Yeah, I needed someone to hitch with."  
  
"How come you found your hitching buddy all the way over from Finland?"  
  
Slowly, Reynir got the full story out of him. He had met his friend via his friend's cousin, who he had in turn met when she had been involved in some kind of Swedish-language summer school Emil had been working at. He was apparently good enough friends with this cousin to be dragged along to family camping trips, where he'd got to know the guy who appeared to be asleep beside him. Their trip south was to meet this same cousin, who had convinced the two of them to come crash in the student flat where she was currently spending an Erasmus year.  
  
"It's so great that you're good enough friends to go travelling together like this! I don't think I know anyone who would follow along with something like that."  
  
Emil had responded to Reynir's enthusiasm with weird discomfort, uncrossing his legs and jamming his hands underneath his thighs. "Hah, yeah. I'd probably just flail around and die if he wasn't carrying the tent, to be honest."  
  
"So he came to look after you? That's so nice!"  
  
"Mm." Emil's enthusiasm for the topic seemed to be dying quickly.  
  
Mikkel spoke up. "For Christ's sake, we know you're dating!"  
  
Reynir had opened his mouth, managing to get out "I didn't know tha-" before being cut off by Mikkel continuing. "He's not bad either, you know. Reminds me of when I lived in America for a couple of years. You would be surprised by how many men you can pick up in the parking lot of a Guitar Centre."  
  
In the time between Mikkel beginning and finishing speaking, Emil's face had gone through a full spectrum of emotions, starting at absolute terror, passing briefly through confusion and settling on slightly hysterical relief. In the light of these multiple pieces of new information, Reynir quietly decided he had potentially the worst gaydar known to humankind.  
  
"I do wonder how the hell you and Captain Camo there got together, though. You seem like, shall we say, rather different people."  
  
Emil's reply had been just that "it works, I dunno."  
  
"He was sending me old memes every day for 6 months. I felt sorry for him." Apparently Lalli was awake and could talk, although the emphasis he pronounced English with was so heavily Finnic it mutated some words almost beyond recognition.  
  
Emil's hands re-entered the conversation as he replied. "Excuse _you_. Someone had to save you from a lifestyle of skinning things in the woods with Tuuri's brother then going home to listen to 20-minute songs about how depressing the forest is."  
  
"I'm feeling so blessed when you're making me get on video call to watch you cry to a Eurovision like complete weirdo."  
  
"Okay, one, Loreen's performance this year was amazing and she deserved an audience. Two, I was drunk." He was tapping his fingers in turn as he spoke, with slightly more drama each time as his points progressed. "Three, as if _you_ can talk about being a weirdo." Emil turned to address Reynir. "He has this tarantula he keeps in a tank in his room - where it can watch anything you do there! - and he fucking _talks_ to it, and-"  
  
"You leave Niiskuneiti out of this!" Lalli interrupted, finally sitting up on his elbows a bit.  
  
Mikkel made a noise that sounded like deep regret for every one of his decisions. "Now I'm going to need one of those sickness tablets. Save it for when you're back in your tent, or I will throw you out of this truck."  
  
The rest of the morning passed without any major incident. Mikkel had briefly quizzed Lalli to see if their mutual interest in shouty music had any real common ground, then apparently realised to his great displeasure that Lalli was "one of _those_ ". Reynir really didn't know what the difference was between Lalli's preferences and Mikkel's, or what he meant by " _those_ ", but it apparently merited about half an hour of Mikkel mocking Lalli about weird folk instruments and recordings of snow falling at night. Lalli remained totally impassive for the duration of the conversation, answering every question with a deadpan tone - yes, actually, he did walk through the woods in winter and think about the moon, and he had a nice time doing it, thanks for asking - that Reynir kind of wished he could use himself when Mikkel got started. Sometime during this conversation, the signs started to indicate that they were travelling down the side of the French border. The next service station they pulled into was somewhere near Freiburg. Reynir had happily noticed that finally, there were real mountains appearing in the distance, and had pointed them out, gesturing Emil over to look at them once everyone was getting out of the truck. Mikkel was unimpressed. "We'll be driving towards those for a while, you know." Lalli had long retreated back into total silence.  
  
They sat down for lunch on the grass, everyone having some kind of supplies with them, and Emil eyed Mikkel casually dispensing food to a grateful Reynir. When Mikkel wandered off towards the bathrooms, Emil had leaned in. "Are you and him, like, a thing?"  
  
Reynir had taken a moment to register the question. "Oh! Um. No. I'm not, um. No."  
  
"Oh, sorry! I just wondered because, you know, you seemed to be sharing all your stuff."  
  
"I'm useless and my bag got stolen."  
  
Emil reacted with wide eyes and a breathy "Really? Oh my god. What are you gonna do?" He seemed satisfied with Reynir's explanation of his plan for the next couple of weeks, though, because he continued with his earlier thought. "Well anyway, I just wondered because, you know, it wouldn't exactly be the worst - don't you think, Lalli?"  
  
Lalli ignored him, totally engrossed in the game of Snake he was playing on his ancient phone. He did not appear to feel the need to own a smartphone, and his ancient Nokia looked like he'd owned it since the "brick" style it was in had last been popular, the case scratched and the batteries very obviously held in with duct tape.  
  
Emil repeated himself. "Lalli. Lalli!" Lalli looked up. "What?"  
  
"That trucker who picked us up. Now that's a bear."  
  
Reynir felt like he more or less understood all these words seperately, but had slightly lost his grip on the interaction that was occurring.  
  
Lalli had looked contemplative. "Not my type. But I am surprised you are not already following him to that bathroom." He returned immediately to playing on his phone.  
  
"I have tonight and tomorrow. Oh my god, this stuff I packed is so wilted now. Chickpea salad, more like chickpea _sadness_."  
  
Lalli looked perfectly happy with the pack of beef jerky, chocolate bar and can of Red Bull that formed his own lunch. Reynir figured he didn't exactly have room to complain about the presliced cheese and bread he was eating. Mikkel eventually returned to tell them break time would be over in a few minutes, and everyone made their own visits to the bathroom before they drove off. The next service station was just over the French border, and by the time they were done for the day they were getting close to Lyon. Reynir had pressed his face to the window the whole time they could see Switzerland in the distance, going on at great length about everything he could peek at from the highway. Mikkel had humoured his and Emil's guesses about the names of the mountains surprisingly well.


	4. I'm The Friend

The next day, Reynir woke up sweating. Every day so far had been much, much warmer than he was used to, but as the truck moved south the effect of the summer heat was leaving him permanently sticky. He still hadn't found a way to change his clothes or shower, and it was getting to the point where it was gross enough to really bother him. Having hair this long turned out to be a real pain the moment the temperature went above 17 degrees. Lalli and Emil were also clearly suffering a bit. When they turned up that morning, Emil had changed into a sleeveless shirt and was complaining about having been woken up by the heat in their tent. "It's not even 9am and I feel like I need a cold shower." Lalli didn't complain out loud, but his grumpiness was palpable. At least once the truck got moving, the air conditioning kicked in and Reynir could try to forget about the stink on him for a second.   
  
The French countryside was at least fairly pretty, and Mikkel let Reynir use his phone to check if his mum had replied to his email. Reynir was relieved to find that she didn't seem terribly worried. He supposed his siblings had gotten up to all kinds of shenanigans as they had gone through their twenties and she'd seen them survive it. Reynir's mum had kind of babied him well into his teens, trying to drag out the time before all her children became totally independent of her, but now that a couple of the older ones were producing grandchildren she had started to ease off. He sent her a brief update, mostly to let her know he'd seen the reply, and spent the rest of the morning chatting to Emil. When he wasn't going off on some long tangent of complaining about how much the humidity wrecked his hair, he was pretty good company. At least all that effort put into his appearance seemed to pay off. Reynir couldn't deny he was a nice-looking guy. Of course, he didn't find him attractive in that way, but he had eyes. Anyone who wasn't totally repressed would have said the same.  
  
Reading the signs, Reynir realised that soon they would be reaching the south coast of France, and the stickiness of the summer started to seem like it had a point. When he wasn't scrambling to pass Mikkel the right coins for the tolls between Lyon and Montpelier, he was staring out the window at the crest of every hill, trying to get a glimpse of bright sea. He couldn't see anything yet, but it was exciting to think about how much he'd traveled so far.   
  
They reached their first stop of the day and Reynir followed Emil and Lalli when they went to take advantage of the shop there. He was surprised to see that in the French service stations, they had piles of fresh-looking baguettes for sale in a rack on the wall. The German ones had only kept rows of soggy premade sandwiches, and the crisp-looking loaves were so cheap. Reynir found enough change left over from his lunch purchase the other day to get one, and really liked it. He wondered if there would be any time to go into a city on the way back up France. If the bread in service stations was this good, he really wanted to try the bread that wasn't being sold to a mid-travel captive audience.   
  
The shop there was packed full of people, mostly children being herded by a couple of harried-looking adults. Reynir tuned out the noise as he munched his baguette and started to follow Emil and Lalli around again. The latter was hunting for more travel sickness pills, looking deeply agitated. When the pack of children acted en masse to scream at an insect one of them had found, the bad time Lalli was having seemed to reach some critical point. He winced and flattened his palms against his ears. Reynir started. "Is he OK?"  
  
Emil ignored him, addressing Lalli quietly. "It's really okay if we leave. I'll find some more for you soon."  
  
Lalli had squeezed his eyes shut and not said anything. Emil dug into his bag and produced a pair of massive over-ear headphones, which Lalli took and put on without attaching any music. Reynir repeated himself. "Um, is he going to be alright?"  
  
Emil looked back at him. "Oh, yeah, it's fine. He has like, a thing. We have a system. Don't worry about it." Reynir definitely did worry at how badly Lalli was coping with the kids continuing to scream, but the headphones seemed to calm him down, and they all got out without the situation getting any worse. Lalli didn't take his headphones off until they'd been free of the noise for some time. During the afternoon ride, Reynir realised with delight that yet another mountain range was slowly coming into view. Mikkel had listened patiently as he pointed out every hint of a bump on the horizon. "I still don't know why you left Iceland if all you want to see is mountains".  
  
"These are different mountains!"  
  
They passed the border into Spain and when they found their place to stay for the night, it had been a tiny petrol station with one bathroom and a small shop that only seemed to sell snacks and beer. The parking lot Mikkel left the truck in was nearly deserted even when they pulled in, and while everyone was milling around stretching their legs, more cars left. Despite the worst of the sun being gone, the heat of the day was still enough to make Reynir feel slightly dead in the outside air. All four of them had walked some way past the other side of the shop, where the noises of the road were less obvious, and dumped their stuff ready for dinner. The grass was far spikier than Reynir felt it should be, dry and full of weird burrs. Mikkel had looked around, appraising the weather and situation. He announced that since it was so warm, and Lalli and Emil would be leaving them tomorrow, they should get some farewell beers. "Emil, you can come help me carry them."  
  
Reynir had jumped up at the chance to help. "I can carry beers too! I'm great at carrying things."  
  
Mikkel had waved at him to sit down again. "We aren't getting that much beer. You wait here." Emil had trotted after Mikkel and Reynir had seen the two of them dissapear to the other side of the building. He was left alone with Lalli, who was sat cross-legged on the ground, showing no hint of a desire to start a conversation. "Hmm. I wonder what Spanish beer is like."  
  
Lalli shrugged. He pulled a tin out of his rucksack and opened it, first extracting a pack of rolling papers.  
  
"Oh. Um. Is that weed?"  
  
Lalli just responded by showing him the bag. It was quite large and still mostly full.   
  
"That's a lot." Well, it was more than Reynir had ever seen in one place, anyway.  
  
"My cousin is growing it."  
  
"The same cousin you're going to meet in Barcelona?"  
  
"No. Her brother. He needs for, mm, anxiety problems."  
  
"Oh. Well. I guess if it helps."  
  
Lalli didn't give any reply to that, so Reynir sat in silence for about ten minutes, watching him produce a small row of extremely neat joints. "You're pretty good at making those."  
  
He still didn't respond, licking the edge of a paper and sliding fingertips along it to close his latest effort.  
  
"I'm so bad at it, you know."  
  
The silence continued.   
  
"Um, how long have those guys been? I feel like it's been almost half an hour. Should we go check on them?"  
  
Lalli gave him a look that told Reynir he did not have a high opinion of his intelligence. "No." He seemed so sure about it that Reynir dropped the subject, despite feeling quite certain that it shouldn't take that long to go buy beer. Suddenly, he heard the truck's horn blare and jumped. "Is that our truck?"  
  
Lalli looked up. "Probably."  
  
"We should go check on them."  
  
"I wouldn't recommend." He had finished rolling his pile and was putting away the tin. There were quite a lot of them, although most of them did end up back inside the tin their contents had come from.   
  
Reynir was deeply confused by Lalli's lack of concern for what had happened to Mikkel and his boyfriend. "What should we do while we're waiting around here, though? If there's nothing else to do, I might as well go look for them."  
  
Lalli seemed to resign himself to entertaining Reynir for a while. "I don't know. Do you smoke?"  
  
Reynir had to admit that he had never made a habit of it. Lalli offered him some anyway, and he coughed a slightly embarrassing amount. He declined the second time. At least now he didn't have much desire to stand up for the next half hour or so. His head was starting to clear a little when Mikkel and Emil finally returned, Mikkel carrying a pallet of cans of Estrella. "Where did you guys go? I thought you'd gotten lost somewhere!"  
  
"Emil was getting something in the truck." Reynir vaguely remembered seeing Emil plug his phone in there earlier, but didn't have time to ask if that was what he'd been fetching, as Emil distracted him with the sound of seemingly having drunk his beer kind of fast. Mikkel handed out cans and sniffed the air. "Hang on a second. Lalli, have you been hiding something from me?"  
  
"You didn't ask."  
  
"I've been driving you for two days. Cough up."  
  
Reynir did not join in as Lalli and Mikkel made their way through a section of the pile Lalli had rolled earlier, and nor did Emil, waving away Mikkel's attempt to pass it to him with "Oh no. It makes me all paranoid and weird". Reynir was still a little woozy, but managed to have a nice conversation with Emil about the studies he was going to start at the end of the summer. He was nearly twenty but hadn't started yet due to some issue getting credits after being homeschooled for a while. He was apparently going into something to do with stage props.  
  
"Setting things on fire with big drama." Lalli supplied this observation from where he'd been dozing, head resting on Emil's thigh.   
  
"Pyrotechnics and costuming. Both are good."  
  
Emil continued to ramble about how he still wasn't sure about exactly what he was going to do if the theatre thing didn't work out, and Reynir listened until the two of them realised they had better go set up their tent. It almost felt like he was living out the travel plan he'd dreamed up back in Iceland. He really couldn't complain about making some international friends while drinking beer in the Spanish sun, and he realised that despite the disaster it had started with, he felt pretty good about the summer he was having. When he laid himself out on the lower bunk of the truck, the warm buzz of a few beers and the Spanish summer night felt nice rather than horrendously sticky. Maybe he'd find a shower when they drove the delivery into Barcelona tomorrow. 


	5. (Interlude)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> This chapter is basically Emil's perspective on the last chapter. There is some development of his character and of his and Lalli's relationship, but it's mostly boning. Be warned, ye who like to be warned of such things.

Emil had followed Mikkel around to the side of the building where they should have turned to go buy beer, then kept following him as he headed directly back to his truck. He knew exactly what the looks he'd been getting all day meant, although he wasn't really sure how far he expected the older man to take it. He was pretty sure he was up for most things, or as sure as you ever could be just based on the way someone looked and acted in public. This guy seemed genuinely nice to Reynir, at least, and that was reassuring given what a massive man he was. Massive, and beefy, and judging by his arms and face extremely hairy. Emil was deeply excited about all of these things.   
  
When Mikkel left him waiting on the tarmac and started to rummage through stuff behind the seats, Emil stood there awkwardly, wondering if he'd gotten something wrong. Mikkel's face appeared again and he tossed Emil a bag. He said something in Danish and Emil just blinked. "Huh?" Mikkel sighed, muttered something that was nearly as incomprehensible but definitely not displaying a high opinion of the Swedish, and repeated himself in English. "You can go sort yourself out."  
  
Emil felt it. For a second, he was confused about what he could feel, then all at once it became familiar. "Oh. A douche." He couldn't fault Mikkel's forthrightness.   
  
"Have I been presumptuous?" Emil thought about it for about two seconds. His decision led to replying "No", turning on his heel and more or less running to the building with the bathroom. He could hear Mikkel laughing at the speed of his retreat.  
  
When he returned a few minutes later, he could see that Mikkel was lounging in the driver's seat of his truck, and had pre-emptively removed his shirt. Emil bit his lip in anticipation and tapped on the door. When he was let in and had climbed up, he wasted no time straddling Mikkel's lap and taking in the field of chest hair in front of him. It was even better than he'd expected, and he ran his fingers through it with wide-eyed appreciation. Mikkel just placed his hands behind his head and leaned back, grinning at his obvious enthusiasm. Emil took the invitation to explore the entirety of the thick-gutted torso in front of him, stroking the thick body hair and shoving his open-mouthed face into an exposed armpit. When he started playing with one hairy nipple and escalated his armpit appreciation to licking them, Mikkel had grabbed him by his hair and shoved his tongue into Emil's mouth.   
  
Emil let Mikkel start to grope him all over and aggressively consume his face. He had been rock hard since the first handful of chest hair and was only getting more desperate. Mikkel pulled back for a second, opening Emil's mouth for him with a force that wasn't exactly rough, but wasn't asking any questions, either. "Ah. So that is a tongue piercing." He continued to grip Emil's jaw with a thumb stuck entirely into his mouth, placing a massive hand on his arse and squeezing. The way Emil responded to being held like that, closing his eyes and moaning, seemed to tell Mikkel something he'd been waiting for. He smiled and informed Emil it was time his clothes came off.   
  
In the course of undressing and being undressed, Emil ended up sprawled facing away from Mikkel. Despite Emil being completely naked now, Mikkel hadn't taken any more of his clothes off, and Emil became suddenly keenly aware of the fact it was broad daylight. "Do you think the others might come looking here?" At least the front seat of a truck was so far above normal eye level that even if people did pass through the nearly-empty lot, they would have to stop and look reasonably hard to realise what was going on here. Or so Emil hoped.   
  
"I assume that boyfriend of yours is wise enough to stop Ginger coming to bother us." Mikkel pushed Emil forward and he held onto the steering wheel for dear life as thick fingers first spread his cheeks, then were followed by a whiskery face burying itself as deep in as it would go. The feeling of Mikkel's assertive tongue starting to work on his hole was enough to make Emil's vision blur and his body shiver. He was aware that the noises he made when people did this were kind of weird, but Mikkel seemed the opposite of put off by his frenzied gasping,  showing his appreciation by growling and digging his fingernails into Emil's hips. Emil went limp as he felt Mikkel's tongue slide into him slightly. He slipped off the wheel and landed on the truck's horn. It blared solidly for several seconds. Scrambling up again, he again felt a stroke of awkward awareness of how public this was.   
  
Feeling someone start laughing directly into his crack was a strange and slightly mortifying experience. Mikkel, at least, recovered quickly. "I think that's the signal to get you into the back seat. I don't think there's anything you can try to wake the dead with there." Emil blinked. He was still ragingly hard and he supposed that back there they would be much less visible. He nodded, feeling slightly dazed. "Yeah. Uh. Where do you keep your condoms?"  
  
"Look on the floor near the passenger seat." Emil complied, suspecting slightly that Mikkel had only directed him down there so he could enjoy the view he presented as he searched, but did indeed find a slightly battered packet with thankfully un-battered contents. Once he'd found what he was looking for, Mikkel manhandled him quite unceremoniously into the space behind the seats. Emil felt his cock twitch again as he was laid out on his back and once again got a full view of the massive, hair-covered shoulders looming over him. Mikkel had found a bottle and was generosly lubricating his fingers. He still hadn't taken his pants off and Emil stared at the erection silhouetted in his jeans, whining slightly at having to wait for it.   
  
He stopped whining when Mikkel spread his legs and slid a finger into him, crooking it slightly upwards to make Emil yelp and arch his back. Mikkel continued, drawing little circles on his prostate, and Emil squirmed, making a variety of faces that Mikkel seemed to greatly enjoy watching. When the first finger was joined by a second one, Emil grit his teeth, starting to feel the stretch of how fat Mikkel's fingers were. After a moment, he relaxed into that too. The fingers were removed, and Emil was rolled onto his front. "You good?"   
  
Emil nodded. "Oh yeah." He heard Mikkel's trousers unzip and looked over his shoulder to see him wrapping up a cock that was easily in proportion to the rest of him. Emil mentally thanked himself for all the life decisions that had led to this moment and braced for impact. The sound he produced as it slid in was one that someone with a clinical mind might have categorised as a human moaning. Someone more creative might have described it as the noise uncertain water pressure would make, if sputtering taps had minds and could become horny enough to completely lose them. He had barely a moment to relax before Mikkel started pounding him hard enough to feel balls slapping against his taint. Emil bit his knuckles hard and still couldn't hold back from being loud enough to defend the territory of a fairly mean howler monkey.   
  
He could feel every one of his rapid heartbeats in the pressurised twitching of his erection. Mikkel was grunting faster, his denim-clad thighs pressed up against Emil's. When Emil finally felt a beefy, calloused hand surround his cock and start squeezing, it took less than a minute for his mind to go completely blank. His awareness returned to the feeling of cum splattering out of him and Mikkel continuing to plow him into the seat at the same speed he had before. Emil clenched his jaw and shivered as the feeling moved rapidly closer to a bad kind of overwhelming. Luckily, it didn't take too long before he felt a hot pulsing inside him and heard Mikkel's grunts turn into slow, hissed breaths that faded into heavy panting as he stopped. When he pulled out, Emil collapsed onto his side and curled up slightly, still gasping a little and feeling very suddenly exhausted.   
  
He could hear the sound behind him of a condom being removed, tied shut and flicked into the bag everyone had been using as a bin. Remembering that this was a place without a real bin reminded him that he was completely naked in the back seat of some guy's truck,and that it was unreasonably hot, and that he was covered in sweat that was only mostly his. Mikkel spoke. "Now I actually want one of those beers we said we were going for. You feeling alright?"  
  
Emil could have gone for a three-hour nap rather than a beer, but he supposed he felt basically fine. "Yeah."  
  
"You need to lie there for a while?"  
  
Emil noticed that he was lying in the little group of wet patches he'd himself made. "Um. Actually, I should probably clean this up."  
  
"You probably should. Reynir sleeps there." Emil cringed and scrubbed briefly at the surface of the seat with a tissue. He decided that what didn't come off was part of the fabric now. There had been stains on there before as well. Reynir probably wouldn't notice anything.  
  
He perked up a little while they were actually completing the beer run they'd promised the others. Emil found a new pack of the travel sickness tablets Lalli always used and threw them on top of the beer. Mikkel paid for them without grumbling about it. When they arrived back to the others, carrying a crate of beer, Lalli just greeted Emil by raking his eyes up and down him. It felt like he was being inspected, and Emil realised that with their locations being usually so different, this was the first time something like this had happened when they were actually in the same place. Lalli seemed to be satisfied with whatever conclusion he'd come to, because he accepted a beer off Mikkel without any air of dislike for him. Reynir had reacted like a dog that had been left alone in the house all day. "Where did you guys go? I thought you'd gotten lost somewhere!"  
  
Emil had already been cracking open a can and was starting to down it, suddenly realising he did quite need a drink of something. The totally neutral seriousness of Mikkel's tone when he replied "Emil was getting something in the truck" was delivered at a bad moment, but Reynir seemed to not twig at all to the timing of Emil starting to choke a little on his beer. Despite being deeply oblivious to seemingly most things, he was good company, asking about Emil's life plans and seeming genuinely interested. Lalli didn't seem to like him a huge amount, but that was true of many people. He was responding to it in much the same way he usually responded to someone's company grating on him, smoking with Mikkel and dozing slightly on Emil's thigh. Emil had laced his fingers in his boyfriend's hair and thought about where they were going to sleep tonight.   
  
Even when not really sober, Lalli moved across uneven ground with an ease that Emil couldn't ever match. Emil just took his half of their stuff and followed him as he searched the oncoming dark for a place that was "right". When Lalli found it, Emil watched as he set up their tent. He had tried to help with this process a few times and just made it slower. Lalli in the middle of doing something, especially something he was good at, was so different to Lalli trying to make conversation with strangers. Emil wished more people got to see him as he was when he worked outside, blending into the world around him and losing himself into deft, competent action. The first time he'd met him, back in Finland, he had been able to range far more into the woodcraft that seemed to be his element. Although setting up a tent in a field in France was really nothing like that, the image did remind Emil of how enthralled he'd been by Lalli's casual proficiency in the forest. When he was done setting up their camp, Emil briefly checked behind him to see if their spot was as secluded as usual, then caught Lalli by the hand, stopping him moving for long enough to plant a light kiss on his lips. "Thanks sweetheart."  
  
Lalli took the hand Emil had caught him with and returned the kiss, slightly less lightly. Emil smiled as one of Lalli's slender fingers traced his jaw, and he circled an arm around his waist, pulling him in closer. Emil was always oddly appreciative of Lalli being about the same height as him. It let them fit together in a way he found indescribably soothing. Light kissing slowly turned into something more explicit, and Lalli responded to Emil's hand sliding down his lower back with "Aren't you tired from what you're doing earlier?"  
  
Emil definitely felt a little hollowed out by the afternoon he'd had, but also, Lalli was extremely beautiful and extremely pressed against his body. "Not really." He pushed Lalli's hair back from his face, running his fingers through it a few times and starting to twist it into a braid down his back. It was a practical choice, because Emil didn't really want a mouthful of long hair later, but wrapping his arms around Lalli to braid his hair for him was also a special casual intimacy.  
  
Lalli's face was not one that broad smiles happened to, but the light in his eyes was unmistakable when he whispered "Good". 


	6. Pat Me On The Ass

Reynir woke up weirdly early. This always happened when he'd gotten a little drunk the night before. He listened to Mikkel's intermittent snoring and lay there quietly, first trying to fall back asleep, then resigning himself to waiting. He picked aimlessly at some kind of crust that was embedded in the carpet near his pillow and thought about what was going to happen next. Mikkel had said that they could drop off Lalli and Emil when they went into the city to deliver the piles of furniture parts that were apparently stashed in the back of the truck. Reynir had offered to help unload it and been told that nobody from the cabin of the truck did that for deliveries of this size. There would be some time when they were free to wander into the city, and apparently Lalli's cousin was keen to go for lunch as soon as that happened, so it sounded like perhaps today would be a real break from the endless truck stops.  
  
Finally, it had been time for everyone to pile in and go. Emil had reached past Reynir and turned on the radio. They had pulled out of the carpark to the sound of some generic Spanish radio patter, then Emil had sat up as the music started again. "Oh, I _love_ this song." The song continued for another second, then Mikkel groaned and said "No!" Reynir recognised the familiar tune last and also let out a noise of frustration. "Not again!" He had only just gotten that song out of his head from the last time he'd heard it back in Germany.  
  
"Hey!" Emil squawked as Mikkel shut the radio off. Mikkel had ordered Lalli to take control of the aux cord to cleanse his ears. After 15 minutes of what seemed to be one continuous track, mostly consisting of distorted guitar and someone twanging a jaw-harp, he took back the offer and put Reynir back on heavily supervised music duty. Eventually, the signs indicated that they were entering Barcelona. Navigating their way into the city involved a lot of Mikkel mistaking the height of bridges, swearing in Danish, and backtracking. Emil was on his phone the whole time, updating Lalli's cousin on their location. Finally, they all reached the delivery point and piled out, eager to stretch their legs. The person who greeted Mikkel, a sweaty man with a clipboard and a high-vis vest, had stared at the backpack-toting youths emerging from the cab with definite interest. Reynir felt slightly worried, given what he'd heard about the rules regarding hitch-hikers, but nobody was yelling and Mikkel seemed unconcerned. Perhaps it was fine after all.  
  
"Tuuri!" Emil was yelling and running off to the side of the truck bay. The object of his excitement was a short, chubby woman with fluffy hair dyed in a slightly faded shade of lilac. Out of all of them she was the only one dressed practically for the summer heat, with a broad-brimmed yellow hat shading her face and mostly-bare shoulders. Her knee-length dress was light enough to allow the breeze, but had deep enough pockets for her keep her free hand stuffed into one as she waved hello. She and Emil greeted each other with kisses on the cheek, then she turned to Lalli. "Lalli!" He let her hug him, telling her something in Finnish. She had pulled back and replied to him in the same way. The handful of similarities in their looks and shared language made it pretty clear that this was the cousin they'd been discussing.  
  
She had turned to Reynir as he followed Emil and Lalli over to her. "Are you the one who's been catching a ride in the same truck?"  
  
"Uh, yeah." Reynir was surprised she already knew anything about him, but supposed it made sense. Emil had been typing an awful lot.  
  
"You're an Icelander, right? That's so cool! And you, you're the guy who's been driving?"  
  
Mikkel had come up behind Reynir as he finished whatever admin had been required. "I certainly am. Am I to understand you're taking us for lunch?"  
  
"Of course! It's the least I can do after you delivered these two safely." She had a sweet, bright face that dimpled as she smiled up at them. When she spoke, she was animated, and her English had none of the strange emphasis or trailing trilling on the R that her cousin's did. "There's a place near here. It's really cute. Do you like olives? You would not _believe_ how cheap they are here..."  
  
The lunch Tuuri had bought them all had been delicious, almost entirely composed of fruit and vegetables that would have been both expensive and unripe back home. She had been extremely interested in Iceland, asking a mix of the standard questions ("So is it true Icelanders believe in fairies?") and specific ones about Reynir's family farm. "I would love to go there one day, you know, but apparently accommodation is so expensive. Hey, do you have Facebook?" Reynir had needed to explain, again, that he was useless and had gotten all his stuff stolen. Tuuri had been sympathetic but undeterred, making him find himself on her phone. "Hopefully you'll be able to find the request when you get home!" Reynir definitely did not know enough people or follow enough stuff on there to miss anyone's requests, even if he didn't get home for several more weeks. It was nice that she wanted to be friends so badly.  
  
"We should get going." Mikkel was finishing his food and picking up his stuff.  
  
"I guess I won't see you guys again." Reynir gave a half-hearted wave to Emil, Lalli and Tuuri, a little sad to be leaving them all. They were all really nice. Well, Emil and Tuuri were really nice. Lalli still glared at Reynir like he had personally pissed in his cereal every morning for a month.  
  
Tuuri had insisted on walking them back to the loading bay where she'd picked them up, so there had been a few more minutes of conversation, mostly between the three of them about their plans for the next two weeks.  
  
"Emil, I don't know if all of Barcelona is ready for your half-naked Belinda Carlisle table dance. I mean, it's beautiful, but it's a lot."  
  
"It had better be ready. I've looked up the deals they have here on shots. I might never go back to Sweden."  
  
Lalli had just asked if Tuuri's housemates had air conditioning, permission to smoke in the flat, and a computer that would run Skyrim. He seemed completely happy with having what sounded like a totally different holiday to the one Emil and Tuuri had planned.  
  
Reynir had found it a little confusing when Mikkel had farewelled Emil by jovially patting him on the butt and telling him to look after himself. He supposed it was nice, and all. If he hadn't been totally secure in his heterosexuality, he would have wanted to touch it too. He noticed this again as the three of them left, turning their backs and heading towards a metro station that would take them to Tuuri's place. Emil must put a lot of work into that. It was good to acknowledge and appreciate the things people put effort into. Reynir was just happy to see him doing well.  
  
Mikkel was waving a hand in front of his face. "Hey. We have stuff to do."  
  
Reynir jumped a little. "Oh yeah. I guess we gotta get back to uh, trucker stuff."  
  
"Wait here and I'll go see when we're picking up the next load of goods."  
  
Reynir had found the nearest bit of shade and sat down. Even in the shadows, the pavement was hotter than pavement had any right to be. He waited for what seemed like quite a long time, watching people pass. He did not speak a word of Spanish, so every conversation was a mystery to him.  
  
Finally Mikkel emerged. "So it turns out we have quite a bit of a break ahead of us."  
  
"Oooh! Do we get the afternoon off?"  
  
"Sort of. I got fired."  
  
Reynir had clapped a hand over his mouth. "Oh no!"  
  
"Yeah, apparently it's not good to turn up with three hitch-hikers in tow. I guess I was on my last warning. Whoops."  
  
Reynir sat back down. "Oh no. Oh _no_. This is my fault. I'm so sorry." Mikkel had been nothing but nice to him, and now Reynir had made him lose his job. He was the most useless lump known to humankind, and he was also even further from Denmark than he'd been before. He put his face in his hands, peeking out in despair from between his fingers. What had he done?  
  
"Reynir. Calm down. This isn't the first time I've been fired. I'll get us back to Denmark."  
  
Reynir looked up, still only daring to show his face through his hands. "It isn't?" This didn't necessarily make the situation seem any better.  
  
Mikkel's eyes rolled upwards as he appeared to do some mental calculations. "I think I lost count of how many times this has happened about five years ago, to be honest."  
  
"How many different jobs have you had?"  
  
"Hmm. Well. I told you about being a roadie for a while. And in that band, I guess that's not a real job but then selling drugs while you do it might be. And I've been driving trucks for what, a year? I've worked in maybe" - he counted on his fingers for a second - "six different bars, security and drinks. Box-lifter behind countless shops. Dug holes in the road for the council. Full-time rat masturbator at a crooked science lab. Dinner server in a school. Hotdog kiosk where I had to wear a full-body hot dog suit. Being one of those people who bothers you in the street and tries to make you sign up for a charity. Digging graves for the mafia-"  
  
"Really?!"  
  
"Why did you question that but not "rat masturbator"?"  
  
"So wait, which of them are tru-"  
  
"Oh, and the time I had something leading tourists around Copenhagen and learned that apparently, some of them check when you just start making shit up. I think that's most of it."  
  
Reynir nodded. This was all interesting information, but didn't tell him anything about how on earth they were getting back to Denmark.  
  
Mikkel just pulled out his phone and called someone. Reynir couldn't understand the ensuing Danish conversation at all, despite technically having had lessons on it at school. Whatever was said, it led to Mikkel being hung up on. He sighed, dialed another number and waited for them to pick up again. This conversation was in English, and consisted of him basically explaining the situation then listening to a long ramble from the other end. Mikkel learned during this conversation that the person he was calling had moved out of Barcelona some months before. He let out another almighty sigh, ended the call and started another. Whoever picked up proceeded to shout at Mikkel for several minutes then immediately hang up. He stared at his phone. "Hmm. I am temporarily out of ideas."  
  
"I'm sorry."  
  
"No, no. We'll work it out." Reynir didn't know when this had become "we", but he was touched. The two of them waited for a long moment in silence. Mikkel looked deep in thought. Reynir was deep in different, presumably more useless thought. The depths they were sitting in were very separate to one another, and neither of them had a single thing to say.  
  
Mikkel's phone began to ring. He looked at it initially with faint surprise, then great surprise as he turned it to read the caller ID. He picked it up and spoke in Danish. The voice that emerged from the phone made him wince a little and hold the phone away from his ear. All the conversation that ensued was quite one-sided, mostly consisting of Mikkel making affirmative noises while the mystery woman loudly informed him of something she seemed very pleased about. After several minutes of this, he hung up. "Hej hej."  
  
Placing his phone back in his pocket, Mikkel extended a hand to help Reynir up. "It appears I do have a friend in the area after all. Our saviour will be here in about an hour. This will be interesting. I think you'll find Sigrun quite an experience."


	7. You're Gonna Need Your Friends

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So I guess I haven't been on Ao3 for almost two months? A lot of stuff happened, I went to Iceland, I got a spinning wheel (so have been occupied spinning other kinds of yarn), I needed a break from interacting with people for a bit, and getting to the end of the Kasvatus Series was incredibly disorienting because no longer churning out 40,000 words a month felt really weird for the first few weeks. Anyway though, I'm back!

Mikkel and Reynir sat together on the pavement, the conversation having found a still point some minutes ago. Passers-by ignored them and their little wall of bags, the pair indistinguishable from two tired tourists waiting for something far more organised. Retrieving the last of Mikkel's things from the truck had been awkward, although you wouldn't have known it from Mikkel's manner as they did so. The thin shade of the building behind them did little to make Reynir less affected by the sizzling heat, and as creepingly disgusting as the feeling of sweat soaking the back of his waistband was starting to feel, it still wasn't as bad as his lingering guilt for the part he'd played in all this.  
  
"So, um." Reynir picked at the sunburn on his arm, something he'd failed to notice developing until far too late.  
  
"Don't do that. It'll just get worse." Mikkel's reminder derailed whatever question Reynir had been trying to come up with, and he squeaked an apology before starting to stare at the pavement again.  
  
"Sorry!"  
  
Reynir was never great with sitting still and waiting for time to pass. The urge to at least fiddle with something was overwhelming.  
  
"So, Sigrun?"  
  
"That's who's coming, yes."  
  
"Where do you know her from?"  
  
Mikkel hummed slightly in consideration. "I think it's better she tells the story, actually. She likes telling it an awful lot more than I do."  
  
"Oh. So... you've known her a while?"  
  
"Oh, yeah. I think we met in, hmm, 1998? I want to say 1998."  
  
"Oh, wow. That is a while."  
  
"Don't remind me. She was on her way to join the army, then."  
  
Reynir was a little surprised. "Didn't you say the army is uh - you didn't seem to like the idea of them much." The impression Reynir had gotten, when Mikkel's explanation of some liner notes had briefly veered in topic, was of a pretty unambiguously negative opinion. Coming himself from a country that only had a coast guard, he'd felt no strong need to disagree.  
  
"I didn't like the idea of those bastards I just finished driving trucks for either. Besides, it didn't last. She's out here now because it's the off-season."  
  
Reynir took a moment to work out what he meant. "She plays sports?"  
  
"Yep. Hockey."  
  
"Oh. That's uh" - Reynir wracked his brain, trying to find any germ of information about hockey large enough to inform a choice of adjective - "nice!"  
  
The silence between them opened up again, leaving room for the staccato roars of the traffic. The shadows were getting a little longer, and although Reynir had given up on the hope of the night being cool enough to actually be comfortable, there was some relief in being able to stretch his limbs out without making the sunburn even worse.  
  
"Mikkel?"  
  
"Yes?"  
  
"What were _you_ doing in 1998?"  
  
Mikkel pursed his lips. "Mostly riding bikes."  
  
"Oh! Like, pedal delivery service?" Mikkel hadn't mentioned this former job, but given the sheer variety of other things he'd claimed to have done, this wouldn't be at all surprising.  
  
" _Motor_ bikes. Not in a very employable way."  
  
"Oh - oh." Reynir pictured this for a moment. "Oh wow that's - that's _so cool_!" Mikkel responding with another one of his sighs did nothing to stem the tide. "So were you doing this with - Sigrun? With her?" Reynir's eyes widened as he thought of the possibilities. "Was there _crime_?"  
  
"Mostly I tagged along with my brother." The dully informative tone to Mikkel's response jarred with the the train of enthusiasm Reynir was on, but was nowhere near enough to derail it.  
  
"I wish I had a motorbike. It would be so _neat_ \- "  
  
"Reynir? Do me a favour and don't. Ever."  
  
Reynir started. The flatness in Mikkel's voice had gained a strained edge, one totally unlike the mock-grumpiness that had come with his threats to defenestrate people for puking in the truck. It struck Reynir that this was the first time he'd heard anything like it. "I'm sorry?"  
  
The two of them were saved from whatever Mikkel's response to that would have been by the sight of a large pickup braking as it approached them, mounting the kerb, and narrowly missing Mikkel's pile of bags as it came to a halt.  
  
_" Der er du jo, din jævla hestkuk!" _The apparently Norwegian woman who had leapt out of the car to approach Mikkel was quite tall, with arms definitely bigger than Reynir's and a short haircut that wasn't exactly a mullet, but seemed to be related in concept. Her white tank top was unmarked, and she wore no jewelry besides the small metal Mjolnir hanging on a short black cord around her neck. Reynir was pretty sure her hiking boots were the exact same kind he was wearing, the sort you bought when you didn't really relish the idea of going to the shops for more within the next ten years.  
  
Mikkel responded to her punching him on the arm with a light slap on the back in return, then gestured at Reynir. "Sigrun. Wonderful to see you too. Ah, and sorry, you have to speak English for this one."  
  
Sigrun followed Mikkel's gesturing, saw Reynir and groaned. When she spoke, her accent was extremely strong. If she was making any effort to form sounds and cadences different to her native ones, it didn't show. "But I'm so much funnier in Norwegian!"


	8. Interlude 2: Bad Reputation

**NORWAY, 1998  
**

Sigrun was firmly of the opinion that the internet was for geeks with no life, but had recently come around to the idea that there were a couple of things it was good for anyway. The fact she was currently peering through the dim lighting of the local metal bar was the result of one of those things. If someone had told Sigrun earlier that you could use the internet to meet girls, maybe she'd have bothered learning to type fast at school.

Maybe Camilla wasn't here yet. So far, the only people Sigrun could see in the dingy little place were men. Most were in a small group, almost all lanky long-haired types leaning against the wall, keeping to themselves and drinking quietly. Sigrun eyed the old Norse imagery in their tattoos with some appreciation, noticing that one sported the rune she shared a name with. The only man not in the group was a huge guy who seemed to be there on his own, his leather jacket painted on the back with that punk A Sigrun had seen scrawled under bridges, his face hidden from view as he leant on the bar to converse with the man staffing it. The barman seemed to appreciate the break in the tedium. It probably wasn't very interesting having to do this on a Wednesday night.

A door Sigrun hadn't noticed before swung open, the sign on it coming into view for a second and answering the question of where the toilets were. While Sigrun had looked at this bar many times growing up, she'd not yet actually come in here, her 18th birthday still barely behind her. The woman stepping out of them was short and adorably pudgy, occupied with pressing her lips together while placing a stick of dark lipstick back in her bag. Even if there had been other women in the bar, the style of boots and corset would have made it very likely this was the same person who went by BatQueen online, and surely she'd notice Sigrun soon. When Camilla finally looked up and saw her date had arrived, she bounded over with an enthusiastic movement that made Sigrun briefly wonder how she managed to keep a strapless top so firmly on herself. "Oh wow, I didn't realise you were this tall!"

"I didn't realise you were this cute." Sigrun should probably have just thought that loudly instead of saying it, judging by the way Camilla's dark-lined eyes widened. Too soon? "I mean, yes, tall, I sure am!" Flicking back her waist-length hair, Sigrun wondered what to offer next. Camilla seemed to be one of those high-maintenence goths that managed to casually wear things Sigrun wouldn't have even known how to sit down in, while she in her Dio shirt was near-indistinguishable in style from the pack of metal guys on the other side of the bar. Did people like this drink beer, or did they exclusively drink wine from chalices shaped like skulls?

Camilla's hand-wavey giggling at Sigrun's awkward questioning was a huge relief. "Beer is fine."

Sigrun really felt like she was better in person than online, and to the extent that conversation could flow well in a bar, she was pretty sure it was working out. Camilla had a lot to say about how she'd made several of the things she was wearing, and about how such items were made in general. Her enthusiasm for the topic was fun to watch, but Sigrun couldn't really contribute much, and eventually they moved on. Sigrun didn't know how she'd failed to mention up till now that she'd be going for military service soon, and Camilla seemed baffled by why you'd opt in.

"My brother hated it! I always feel bad for boys having to go."

"I dunno, it looks like fun to me. I'm from a military family, I'll probably end up there eventually anyway." Sigrun had to raise her voice quite a lot to get that across. While a lot of the music in here was possible to have a conversation over, she could swear the barman was turning it up every time one of a small handful of particularly overplayed Slayer songs came on.

"Hmm, I suppose." One of the few conversational lulls they'd had so far ensued, and both women took a sip of their beers. Sigrun had ended up sitting with her back to most of the bar, and was opening her mouth to speak again when she noticed Camilla's gaze anxiously fixed on a point behind her. The scene behind them had barely changed in the last hour, the big guy still intently conversing with the barman while the pack of men in the corner got steadily more and more drunk together. While a few bursts of noise had come from that group, they'd so far remained barely worth noticing, and Sigrun turned to see what the problem was. While the barman's new friend was gone, the men had continued to get more rowdy.

"Are they doing like, Nazi salutes?" Camilla's voice was full of resigned disgust, and her assessment of the situation seemed entirely correct. Sigrun rolled her eyes and returned to how she'd been sitting, sighing dramatically.

"I thought they were getting sick of that one now. First it was like, ooh, we're going to use bloody sheep heads on stage, that's _super brutal_ and definitely not something my grandma would just make soup out of! Then they tried the church arson, then this stuff - they're just idiots - "

"I'm still not really sure I want to hang around, to be honest." Camilla translated the unease into action by starting to quickly finish her drink. Even though Sigrun wasn't herself afraid of some stringy black metal types - sure, they stabbed people sometimes, but usually only their own equally weedy bandmates - it rubbed her the wrong way that these losers were ruining Camilla's time, and thus ruining her date. She stood up, placing her own half-finished drink on the bar with a small but assertive clunk. "Sigrun? Are you about to - "

Sigrun was definitely about to.

Approaching the offending corner, Sigrun slapped her palms down on the table. All four of the men sitting there briefly paused at the interruption, the smallest of them fiddling with the many rings on his fingers as she stared him down. "Hey. Cut it out."

There was no response for a moment, then the object of her staring looked between her and his friends before responding "What?".

"Quit the saluting. It's annoying."

The mousy little man's face bloomed into a smirk as he eased himself past the table and in front of Sigrun, pushing her back from the table a little. "Ooh, are you  _ offended _ ? What are you going to do about it?" The second overplayed Slayer song in a row starting to come from the bar only seemed to embolden him.

Sigrun raised her voice to get through the music yet again. "You're ruining my date." The glee that spread over the man's face at her loud pronouncement made Sigrun realise, a split second too late, that her chronically runaway mouth had once again worked faster than her brain did.

"Oh you're on a  _ date _ ? With  _ her _ ? She looks kind of freaky, you know, later on I reckon you two could let me wa - "

Socking this guy in the jaw was neither mature nor the smartest fighting move. Sigrun’s knuckles felt it. However, it did make him stop talking. The way he fell back on the table, right in the middle of a circle of his gawping friends, was satisfying in a way you couldn't really achieve with a witty comeback. Sigrun's brief moment of victory glow was cut short when she heard Camilla yell "Sigrun!" in tones of clear horror, then saw the remaining three men starting to get up. Sigrun's arm was still extended, ready to displace her mouth's title as the most trouble-seeking part of her.  
  
Thankfully, the first guy to reach her went down as fast as the ringleader, and the second's aim was poor enough for her to easily weave back before returning with a kick to the stomach that got him on his knees. He didn't stay down, though, and his remaining friend getting loose of the table didn't bode well. The barman starting to shout at them did little to deter the most persistent two from trying to surround her, but Sigrun wasn't stupid enough to let them, backing past another table full of loose stools she took full advantage of.  
  
"Put that down!" The barman starting to shout at Sigrun didn't make his pleas any more effective, and she swung at one man's head with a stool, missing him by a hair. The other ran around behind her, hanging back but clearly getting ready to rush her the moment she engaged more closely with his friend. Holding her stool and taking a wide stance, Sigrun flicked her attention between the two of them. Somewhere in the background, the first guy was starting to peel himself off the table, and she'd lost track of the first one she'd punched. As the two surrounding her edged closer, Sigrun swung out with the stool again, actually managing to clock one around the head and knocking him to the floor. Once again, there was no space to enjoy the victory, as her lost opponent reappeared close to the one behind her and began to close in.  
  
Backing up, Sigrun started to entertain the unusual suspicion that she'd bitten off more than she could chew here. She circled the room with her stool still held aloft, trying to ignore Camilla's increasingly distressed yelling from the sidelines, and the two men mirrored her. As the two of them came up against one wall near the bar, a door opened behind them, and the huge leather-jacketed man Sigrun had seen earlier emerged from the men's toilets.  
  
His eyes widening in surprise made Sigrun notice for the first time that despite his great bulk, he was likely barely older than her. The moment of wondering whether he was about to transform into yet another adversary couldn't have lasted longer than a second in reality, but the fact he was much heftier than any of the others injected that pause with enough actual fear to stretch it out almost beyond bearing. His course of action turned out to be almost anticlimactic, first sighing deeply, then picking the two men up by the back of their shirts. Even through the aftershock of that moment of terror, the sight of them yelping and squirming at the treatment was enough to prompt Sigrun into a brief, incredulous laugh.  
  
In the corner of her eye, Sigrun could see the guy she’d hit with a stool start to crawl back up, before appraising the situation and deciding to stay sitting where he was. The first one she’d punched stayed on his table, eyeing the new contender with obvious worry. Having effectively stopped the fight, the huge man proceeded to watch the two he was holding squirm and attempt to free themselves. Sigrun noticed, as the man raised his voice over the music, that the same song she herself had shouted over at the beginning of this was still only starting to fade out.    
  
Despite how loudly he was talking, it took Sigrun a moment to quite catch the start of an argument between him and the barman. After a few sentences, she finally twigged that it wasn’t just the distortion of him yelling over music, but also the fact that he was speaking Danish.    
  
“I think you’ll find I didn’t actually do anything.” Despite the volume, the man’s tone was decidedly level.    
  
“Not my problem. You got involved. All of you, out, _now!_ ” The barman was picking up a phone. “I will call the police, you know.”    
  
The big man met Sigrun’s eyes and sighed again, ignoring the barman’s instructions to “And drop those guys!” as he carried them to the door, kicked it open and tossed them outside. “My hand’s on the number, look!”   
  
“I just dropped them.  _ You _ look.” Despite the faint head rush Sigrun was starting to feel as the pounding in her chest faded, she smirked at the mild tone the man took as he gestured towards the window, where the two discarded ones outside had scrambled up and started glaring inwards.    
  
Camilla finally leapt down from her bar stool, collecting her things up as quickly as possible. “Oh, my God.” Glancing nervously at the men now loitering outside the bar, she addressed the barman. “Please call me a taxi. I am not even walking to the bus station after this.”    
  
The barman put the phone down for a moment, then picked it up again. “Yeah. Sure. The rest of you, though -  _ out _ !” He shut the music off with the flick of a switch, the sound system making a dull thud as it faded into uncomfortable silence.    
  
Camilla turned to Sigrun. “It was, um, nice knowing you.”    
  
“Oh.” Sigrun was not the best with hints, but this seemed to be less a hint and more a statement. “Uh. Sorry.” Turning to the barman herself, she tried to moderate her voice just a little. “Yeah, um, please make sure she gets home and stuff.”   
  
The barman didn’t respond, rolling his eyes and starting to dial. “Yes, hello, I’d like to order a taxi for - ”    
  
Outside the bar, the two fighting parties separated, leaving Sigrun with the big man. She watched them skulk off, unwilling to take her eyes off them until they were truly gone. Finally sure she’d seen the last of them and turning to her apparent new companion, Sigrun immediately launched into an irritated rant. “This is  _ such _ bullshit.”    
  
“Mm. Quite likely.” Outside in the cooler and quieter air, the Danish wasn’t too hard to parse. “Would be nice to know what actually happened, though.”   
  
“Ugh! You know, those black metal types with their pig’s blood and their, you know - they were sat there all like - ” A passerby gave Sigrun a shocked look as she demonstrated, throwing up her arm before adding a finger moustache and some little marching-foot actions for effect, and the big man pursed his lips before gently pressing down on Sigrun’s hand to bring it back down.    
  
“Okay, yes, I see.”    
  
“Like  _ maybe _ I punched them first, but they _ fully  _ deserved it - ”    
  
“Oh, undoubtedly.”    
  
“And now my date is ruined.” Sigrun paused to note the man’s reaction, and wasn’t sure how to take him once again raising his eyes to heaven, crossing his arms and sighing.   
  
“Tell me about it. I thought I was getting somewhere with that barman, too.”    
  
Oh. Well then. “Should we go get drunk somewhere else?”   
  
“I have a crate of beer in my car.”   
  
“Why were you drinking in a bar if there’s beer in your car?”   
  
“No attractive barmen in my car.”    
  
“Good point.”    
  
“My name’s Mikkel, by the way.”   
  
“Sigrun! Don’t think you being fatter is going to mean you get more than half the beer.”    



	9. Reciprocate

"And so that's how Mikkel met me, just as I was getting done winning that bar fight. No big deal. Six dudes is easily enough for me to handle." Sigrun turned to face the back seat where Reynir was sitting, wide-eyed and slack-jawed at the epic tale she'd just spun. "Not that you'd expect anything different from my reputation, I would guess!"  
  
"Eyes on the road, Sigrun." Mikkel's fourth iteration of this reminder was just in time for Sigrun to turn back and swerve back on track as the road curved. Her control of the vehicle, which she had been sure to point out had both a comfy back seat and a sizeable cargo tray, seemed basically competent but also definitely subordinate to her need to gesture during conversation.  
  
"Your reputation?" Reynir felt like he must be missing something.  
  
"Well, I guess you've heard of me." Sigrun overtook the campervan in front of them, swearing in Norwegian as it wobbled close to her. She addressed Reynir again, thankfully without looking at him this time. "Centre for the Polar Bears?"  
  
"Um." Reynir was drawing a complete blank. "A wildlife centre as well? Mikkel just told me you played hockey."  
  
Mikkel piped up again. "It's the Norwegian women's hockey team. She means she plays centre."  
  
"Yep! Fourth line. Not because I suck, though. Could totally move up if I wanted. They just need someone there who they know for sure won't hesitate, you know?" Sigrun once again spoke as if she was sure Reynir knew what "not hesitating" entailed. While he didn't know much about hockey, everything he'd learned about Sigrun so far did give him some guesses. He'd overheard the term "blood on the ice" once or twice, he was pretty sure.  
  
"Oh! Well, that's - that's pretty neat!"  
  
"It sure is! Best job ever. And all this free time in the summer for road tripping."  
  
"Oh! Yeah!" Reynir wondered if there might be anything Sigrun talked about that he could really contribute to. "So uh, what do you do when you're not playing hockey?"  
  
"Coach hockey. Under-14s girls. That also dies off a bit in the summer, you know, when the school schedule's off."  
  
"Ah! I guess it's a nice break from um, full sized adult hockey?"  
  
"Oh, I don't know. Most 12 year old girls go pretty wild the first time they're actually encouraged to hit things with sticks." The way Sigrun grinned at that, visible in the rear-view mirror, spoke of a great satisfaction in her work there.  
  
"Huh." Sigrun didn't elaborate any more, and Reynir took a moment to process all he'd heard since getting in the car with her. The story had been told at epic enough length that they'd managed to clear the city limits some time ago, and so far the route Sigrun was taking was essentially back the same way he and Mikkel had come by that morning. Reynir would have to email his mum again soon. Sigrun was perfectly happy to take the two of them along on her road trip, but would not be accepting alterations to her planned route. Reynir apparently still had a clear couple of weeks before he would reach Scandinavia again.  
  
"Hey, Mikkel. Put some music on." Sigrun had settled back in her seat with one hand on the wheel, easing into the tedium of highway driving.  
  
"Please, no Viking shit."  
  
"I'm sorry, who do you see driving? Whose car is this?"  
  
"Fine. What do you want?"  
  
"Ooh, I know, let's let your toyboy pick."  
  
"Excuse you. When I said I picked him up in Poland, I meant it in a purely literal sense."  
  
Sigrun barked with laughter. "Oh, my bad. Hey, Reynir. Pick something."  
  
Reynir decided to ignore whatever had been going on in that conversation and examined the stack of CDs Mikkel had handed him. _Manowar. Amon Amarth. Sabaton. Hammerfall._ Neither these nor any of the other names on here were hugely familiar to him, but Reynir had been force-fed enough of the sagas going through the Icelandic school system to recognise a lot of the scenes on the album art. Mikkel's hand was still extended back, waiting to recieve Reynir's choice. Carefully excluding any that obviously depicted an improbably muscular Thor fighting sea monsters, Reynir settled on one that seemed fairly modern in style and handed it over.  
  
Mikkel looked at it. " _Carolus Rex_. Well, Reynir, it was nice knowing you."  
  
Sigrun whooped. "Great choice! Nothing like driving to this one!" Reynir felt that phrasing to be somewhat ominous, and it turned out he was completely correct to do so. Sigrun proceeded to skip through half the tracks, arrive at a section of Swedish songs, and then gun it down the road while singing along to them at the top of her voice.  
  
Mikkel turned to face Reynir and shouted over the sound of Sigrun's off-key belting. "I feel like there'll be some irony to it if she manages to kill us during _Gott Mit Uns_."  
  
Reynir was pretty sure this was another joke. Sigrun had survived this long, and Mikkel seemed utterly unsurprised by absolutely all of her behaviour. Surely, that implied she was always like this, and had been making it work for some time. As another swelling chorus encouraged her to overtake more cars, Reynir wondered if that was wishful thinking. Still, the music continued, and Sigrun's driving followed it, and none of them died. After about forty minutes of this, the constant near-death road experiences faded into the background, and Reynir felt almost relaxed about it when he was tasked with picking the music again.  
  
"This is pretty catchy, actually." _Twilight of the Thunder God_ was still extremely cheesy and shouty, but Reynir could get into it.  
  
"Oh, not you too!" Mikkel was saved from hearing any more of it when Sigrun pulled into a petrol station and shut the music off. Night was finally starting to properly fall, and after Sigrun had refuelled the car, she returned from the small shop there with three large sandwiches, three hefty bottles of soft drink and an armful of packets containing chips, sweets and other snacks.  
  
"No, don't worry about it!" was her only response when Reynir looked awkward about taking the food. She tore into her own dinner leaning against the bonnet of her car, scarfing the sandwich down in less than four bites. "If you've been eating Mikkel's cooking since Poland, you probably need it." It didn't seem to occur to her to hold back with the snack offerings on a mere technicality like having met Reynir two hours ago, and once she'd consumed her fair share as well she started tapping her foot and thinking out loud. "So, I think Mikkel's gonna fit in my tent. Not easily, but well, we've shared smaller sleeping spots before. You good to sleep in the car? We can get the softer luggage out of the tray and pile some up in there."  
  
"Oh, yeah, that's totally fine!" Reynir was still working his way through his sandwich, feeling like Sigrun had been more than generous to him already.  
  
"I guess we'll drive a bit further to the next service station and camp out near there, so we can shower in the morning and stuff." Sigrun seemed satisfied with this plan, crunching her chip packet into a tiny ball and squinting towards the nearest bin for a moment before tossing it. It bounced against the wall and landed squarely in the middle of the intended receptacle. "Yes! Nice!"  
  
"Wait, there are showers at those service stations?" Reynir thought about how many days worth of body odour were currently layered on him. The idea that this could have been avoided the whole time was a bit mortifying.  
  
"Oh yeah. I should have mentioned that, probably." Mikkel was already back in the passenger seat. "I'm sure we can find you a spare shirt somewhere tomorrow morning."  
  
"Oh - wow, thank you." Reynir wondered where on earth he was going to find new underwear, and how he might go about paying for it. Borrowing a shirt was one thing, but being loaned someone else's underpants would have been way too much, even if there was the slightest chance of Mikkel's fitting him. As non-ideal as it was, he supposed going commando for a couple of weeks wouldn't kill him.  
  
The drive onwards wasn't too long. Reynir borrowed Mikkel's phone yet again, and tried to make the latest apologetic email to his mum sound as non-alarming as possible. At least her last response had been more resigned than truly worried. When Sigrun finally decided it was time for no more conversation, Reynir hunkered down in the back seat of the car, the lights of the nearby service station leaving curved shadows on the fabric. The promise of getting clean in the morning was a very nice one, especially with how stuffy the car got with the windows shut tight against insects. Sleep should have been very difficult with the heat, the increasing chaos of his life, and being too long for the seat he was sleeping on. Reynir slept peacefully anyway, the shifting bright spots of car headlights and the distant hum of their engines making it hard to tell when exactly he dropped off.  
  



	10. Hippie Dude

Reynir had no idea what it was like to have the kind of religious experience that turned someone into a born-again fanatic for whatever they'd gotten in touch with, but there had been a few times in his life that made him pretty sure he was capable of a similar depth of awe and joy. Highland climbs on bleak autumn mornings during the yearly sheep-fetching, when sun-staves broke through the clouds to hit the peaks of the craggy fells. Being on a boat in a stormy fjord as the mist cleared. Watching waterfalls on bright summer nights, the rush of movement under such unchanging hazy light making the passage of time surreal. There were many times like that he could list, moments where the divine had felt extremely close to his otherwise fairly mundane existence.  
  
Now, in this service station bathroom, he was having another such experience. The tap took a bit of effort to turn, but the water ran hot very quickly, and the feeling of layered-up sweat finally leaving his skin was definitively better than sex. The heat hitting his skin was yet another reminder of how prickly with sunburn he had become, but his shoulders were at least still intact, and the heavy water pounding them was so good he had to close his eyes and appreciate it. It was very tempting to stay in this shower for at least half an hour, but Reynir tried to make quick work of it, knowing there might be a queue forming out there. When he pulled his jeans back on and emerged, a short, tan man who had already mostly disrobed shuffled into the cubicle he'd left. The man's muttered _merci_ reminded Reynir that they must have just about crossed back over the border the night before.  
  
Moving to his pile of things by the sink, Reynir put down Sigrun's bar of soap and picked up the shirt Mikkel had loaned him. It was apparently the smallest thing Mikkel had with him, and still Reynir was probably going to be drowning in it. The sleeves and collar had been cut off long ago, leaving only a strip of a few centimeters to hold it on Reynir's shoulders, and the black cloth had faded to a dark grey. While he had gathered the text on it was the name of a band, he also suspected Mikkel found the idea of Reynir walking around in a singlet that said _Strapping Young Lad_ quite funny. At least the fact this had been cut up so much would make it less warm.  
  
Thinking about that reminded Reynir of another thing he'd meant to do. Picking up the scissors he'd retrieved from Mikkel's bag of "assorted useful things", he looked down at his jeans and made a small, sad noise. His mum was going to be so annoyed at him for destroying them, when he only owned two pairs of trousers in the first place. At least one of Reynir's sisters would be going to Glasgow for cheap clothes sometime in the autumn, though, so after painful weighting he'd decided two more weeks in this heat did merit this. With Reynir's lone pair of underwear already discarded by the sink, it would have been a bit rude to take his jeans off right here where everyone was walking around, so Reynir tried to cut them off into shorts without removing them.  
  
The results were horribly uneven, and in the process of repeatedly trying to fix them, they only got shorter and shorter. By the time Reynir was finally satisfied and looked back towards the mirror, the hems of his jorts were further from the ground than the tip of his braid. Having most of his blindingly white thighs visible was not exactly what Reynir had intended, and when he pulled Mikkel's cutoff shirt on, he realised with great awkwardness that its length made him look like he wasn't wearing any pants. Oh, dear. Pulling up the shirt and tying it at the side at least proved he did have shorts on, and made him look a bit less like a scarecrow dressed in a binbag. The way the shirt's thin fabric hung off his shoulders still reminded him just a little too much of his sister Hildur's "boho" phase, but it would have to do.  
  
Only having one pair of socks was also a problem, but Reynir guessed he could wash them in the sink with his underpants and go around barefoot until they dried. When he returned to the car, carrying his shoes in one hand with his rinsed socks and underwear in the other, Sigrun caught sight of him first and appeared to snort a bit of the coffee she was drinking out of her nose.  
  
" _Ow_ \- Holy fuck! Good morning, Britney."  
  
Mikkel emerged from the other side of the car to see what the fuss was, saw Reynir, then placed his face in his hands and shook lightly with laughter for a few seconds. He managed to recover before Sigrun did, regaining his composure and restraining himself to a mild comment about how Reynir seemed a bit more ready for summer, then disappearing again to take his turn on the little stove Sigrun had just made her own coffee on. Reynir felt cursed by his ginger complexion as his two companions' mirth left him blushing. He supposed the way he'd tied the shirt did make it ride up on his midriff a little, but really, aside from embracing the no-pants look there wasn't really any other option here. He guessed he could take a little joking.  
  
Sigrun finally stopped laughing and gestured at the wet items in Reynir's hand. "You can lay those out on the cat-tank's tray to dry for a bit, we're not going quite yet."  
  
"The cat-tank?"  
  
"Yeah! It's what I call this thing." Sigrun slapped the bonnet of her car, grinning in the same way she always did when she talked about it.  
  
"How come?"  
  
Mikkel lifted his voice to interrupt. "It's because she thinks nobody can work out she means 'pussy wagon' - "  
  
Sigrun called back at him even more loudly. "No need to be fucking _rude_. Here I am, driving you and Britney around - "  
  
"Can that please not be my nickname?" Reynir's interruption was a lot more quiet and awkward than Mikkel's had been.  
  
"Alright, Pippi." Sigrun grinned at Reynir again before pouring the dregs of her coffee on the ground and moving to toss her tent bag in the tray. Reynir decided complaining about the nicknames was probably just asking for trouble, and that acting on Sigrun's suggestion for drying his pants and socks was wise. He watched with interest as during the lull in conversation, Sigrun sat on the bonnet and started shuffling a deck of cards, finally pulling one out to lay on the metal beside her and sitting in quiet contemplation for a moment.  
  
"Uh, what's she doing?" Reynir leaned over to Mikkel as he finished making coffee, speaking quietly so as not to interrupt Sigrun.  
  
"Oh, she's kind of superstitious and does all sorts of things like that. You can ignore it." Mikkel appeared to be taking his own advice on that point, having not even glanced over to Sigrun's little ritual. "You want coffee as well?"  
  
"Oh! Yeah, that sounds good actually." Picking up Sigrun's discarded mug from the ground, Reynir sat down and slightly regretted answering in the affirmative, as the liquid Mikkel was cheerfully taking a second cup of turned out to be black and horribly bitter. He was usually shameless about admitting he was a total wimp about how he took his coffee, the kind of person who took several minutes by the counter in Te og Kaffi, cheerfully listing off more kinds of syrup for the glorified pile of whipped cream he was ordering. However, he was really not in a position to complain about the provisions here, so consumed the nuclear liquid in careful little sips.  
  
As the three of them were getting ready to leave, Reynir saw someone approaching the car and pointed him out to Mikkel. "I think that Australian guy wants to talk to us."  
  
Mikkel looked where Reynir was indicating. "You know, for a moment I was about to ask how the hell you already knew he was Australian."  
  
Reynir sighed. Even with how far out from Reykjavik his family lived, he was by now very well versed in identifying kinds of tourist. One of these approaching didn't come with quite the same bone-deep irritation he now felt at the mere sound of Americans, nor quite the same looming dread of hearing a loud British accent saying "Ooh, I wonder if this comes off?", but even before this man opened his mouth Reynir felt himself anticipating some kind of chaos. His board shorts were covered in stylised waves, and his shirt provided almost as little coverage as the one Reynir was wearing, revealing some kind of "tribal" styled necklace and a kite-shaped arrangement of stars tattooed on one shoulder. The tangled shoulder-length hair and broad swimmer's shoulders completed the picture slightly too well. Reynir supposed the annoyance already bubbling up through him was unfair. This time, he was also a tourist here. The backpack and sign with "Italy" scrawled on it could have been him. In fact, it showed more organisation than Reynir himself had.  
  
By the time the man got close enough to ask "So uh, where are yous going?" Reynir was so determined to make up for his initial reaction that he immediately blurted out "We're going through Italy soon!"  
  
"I guess we do have another spot in the back seat." Sigrun seemed ambivalent about Reynir's implicit offering-up of her car space.  
  
Mikkel just sighed.  
  
During the ride along the Mediterranean coast, Jarrah - Reynir was sure this must be a nickname of some kind, because he'd never heard that name before in his life - proved to be fairly boisterous company. Reynir had never heard of the place he claimed to be from, and realised with slight shame that the follow-up explanation "about three hours south of Brisbane mate" meant absolutely nothing to him. Even more concerning was the fact that his description of the place as having "lotsa yabbies" didn't even sound like real words. Reynir ended up nodding and smiling a lot. It had been about a decade since he last even questioned how competent his grasp of English was, but having an extended conversation with Jarrah was making Reynir wonder if he'd been greatly overestimating himself all this time.  
  
Somewhere slightly closer to Marseille than Nice, Sigrun decided she felt like a break. She and Mikkel went to see what the food situation here was, and Jarrah leaned against the car while Reynir sat on the ground in front of him, stretching out his legs. While the car was perfectly roomy by objective standards, there were few vehicles that didn't make Reynir feel extremely cramped within a couple of hours. He was slightly jealous of his riding companion's chunky figure, not only because being more compact would definitely make long car rides easier. he had caught himself eyeing the broad, muscular shoulders on display more than once during their journey so far. It was honestly hard not to stare all the time, with the way the sun-bleached hair brushed those shoulders. Once again, Reynir reminded himself that it was a nice, positive thing to appreciate traits people had worked hard for, and that paying attention to people's good qualities was a very standard human response.  
  
"Mikko's a mad cunt!" Jarrah looked contemplative, for a certain value of such. Reynir had stopped trying to correct the way he pronounced Mikkel's name several hours ago.  
  
"Oh. Um, I like him actually, I think he's really nice." Reynir wasn't sure what had prompted this comment, and Jarrah's tone seemed to totally mismatch the content of what he'd said.    
  
"Too right! And that story about escaping a warehouse gig gone wrong, he's a bloody legend!"  
  
Reynir started to suspect they were talking somewhat at cross-purposes. "Oh, yeah. It was pretty neat."  
  
"What's his Swedish missus called again? Sigrod?"  
  
"I - um, I think you've - her name's Sigrun." Reynir had also given up trying to make sure they were on the same page all the time here.  
  
"She's a bloody legend too. Dunno what she's saying most of the time. No worries though, I'm not racist against anyone, except rangas a bit, but you're alright."  
  
Reynir was totally lost again. "That's good?" Even if he'd had a chance of understanding that sentence, his attention had been caught midway by the movement of Jarrah crossing his arms and thereby pulling his thin shirt tight against his pecs. He opted not to ask for a repeat, instead trying not to be too open in his slight awe of the figure that paddling a surfboard out for hours every day apparently produced.  
  
Thankfully, the food situation was not interesting enough to keep Sigrun and Mikkel, and Reynir was saved from trying to make sense of the conversation by himself for too long. During the next leg, Sigrun tried to ascertain exactly how far into Italy their new passenger wanted to go. "I'm not going past Sanremo today, doing the highway near Genoa in evening traffic's gonna be hell."  
  
"No worries. I can get going by myself, you've been driving me for ages! Thought this bit would take me a couple days." True to his word, after three more hours on the road Jarrah picked his backpack out of the tray and strapped it back on. Before he departed, he fished into his pocket and produced a tiny baggie of weed. "Hey, I bought this in Madrid, it's a bit shithouse but it'll do ya!" Mikkel accepted the apparent compensation for the ride with a quirked eyebrow and an appreciative nod, making Reynir wonder when and how he was ever going to approach even this level of payback for everything he'd inflicted on Mikkel and Sigrun so far.  
  
Sigrun apparently had food around that could be cooked on her little camp stove, and with a fair bit of the evening free, Reynir tried to be as helpful as he could be. Without Mikkel to stimulate a general conversation, he wasn't sure exactly how to talk to her. Commenting on the events of the day seemed like a fair start. "That hitch-hiker was cool! I liked him."  
  
"Hah! I noticed." Sigrun smirked at Reynir and gestured at the bag of macaroni he was holding. "The water's boiled, that can go in now."  
  
"Oh!" Reynir poured most of the packet in, hoping that was right. "He was a bit hard to understand, though."  
  
"You didn't look like you wanted a deep conversation though, did you?" Sigrun's barking laugh came with a jab to the ribs this time, her needling clearly intended as some kind of bonding activity.  
  
"I - " Reynir suddenly realised what she was getting at. The blush filled his face with the abrupt force of a glacial lake breach flooding a valley. "Oh no, you've misunderstood! I'm totally - um, you know! I don't, um - "  
  
"That's way too much macaroni, you're gonna have to scoop some out. There's a fork somewhere."  
  
Reynir was very grateful to be saved from explaining what he meant there, because he wasn't even sure what he had been planning to say. By the time he'd finished scrambling around looking for a fork, Reynir could just about kid himself that he'd stopped blushing.  
  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I should probably clarify that the word "ranga" as it is used in Australia means "ginger".


	11. Wish I'd Taken Pictures

The highway east towards Genoa reminded Reynir of parts of the Icelandic ring road. This was not a good thing. Tucked right up against the side of the mountain, the road twisted and turned, and the Italian drivers contested Sigrun’s place as “worst driver Reynir had ever seen” every other minute. Reynir again suspected, now with more weariness than panic, that he was going to die.  
  
At least the views were good. The mountainside to his left, covered in interesting, blocky buildings, rose up rough and sharp. On the right, the sun on the sea was so bright it was almost hard to see how strikingly blue the water was. Every time they got near a town, Reynir pressed his face against the window, taking in the buildings of different eras crammed into the creases of the hills.  
  
“Please don’t make us listen to another Rhapsody of Fire album.” Mikkel was still complaining about Sigrun’s choice of driving music.  
  
“It’s _themistic_.” Sigrun was not budging. “Because we’re in Italy.”  
  
“ _Thematic_. Is that the word you mean? And the only _theme_ I’m noticing is that power metal makes your driving worse…”  
  
Mikkel was cut off by Sigrun starting to curse in Norwegian again, braking hard as a man on a moped cut her off. Neither the moped’s driver nor the girl clinging to his back seemed to notice Sigrun honking and yelling at them in the slightest. Reynir considered trying to lie and say there were no more albums about dragons under the seat, but given Sigrun surely knew the exact size of her vast collection, the idea died quickly. Training his eyes on some distant island in the sea, he gave up trying to work out when Sigrun was going to drive off the cliffside. It would happen when it happened, he guessed.  
  
By some miracle, they made their way almost to Genoa. As they parked and started to head into the first service station of the day,Reynir heard the mocking whistles and shouts of a group of men. Although he didn’t speak a word of Italian, it was pretty easy to surmise from the hand motions that it was something to do with his extremely displayed thighs and “2001 Britney” style shirt arrangement. Reynir ducked his head and hurried into the building faster. Luckily, the moment passed out of his mind the instant he entered the service station, as he realised it was even better than one of the French ones. “Oh, wow! Is that like, local salami?”  
  
“Oh, yeah. They love their local food here, I guess.” Mikkel was just buying a sandwich in exactly the same way he had in Germany and France.  
  
“Hell yeah, fancy meat!” Sigrun went straight for the salami Reynir had been eyeing and shoved it under her arm with all the other food. “Nice spot, Pippi.”  
  
Reynir felt a little bad for thinking such nasty things about Sigrun’s driving for the past few hours. Outside, she threw the bread, cheese and salami she’d bought down in front of Reynir without saying a word about it. When she wandered off with Mikkel to look at the view, Reynir sat on the grass - not actually any scratchier than the spiny Spanish grass, but much more noticeably so, in these jorts - and realised that all that worrying in the car had made him very hungry. Slapping some of the interesting cheese on the bread, he devoured a few slices, then reached for the massive salami. Unsure how exactly to open it, he settled for peeling back the paper from one end and nibbling the tip.  
  
From the side, he heard a voice jeering again. Two members of the pack of men were passing by, heading back to their car with shopping bags in hand. Reynir’s awareness of how he looked, sprawled out on the grass with a massive salami on the tip of his tongue, arrived all at once with great embarrassment. He was just wondering if he should be getting properly worried about this when Mikkel appeared behind both his taunters, tapping them on the shoulder and looking extremely unimpressed.  
  
“You didn’t have to scare them away”, Reynir said, as the two men responded to Mikkel’s glowering with a quick retreat.  
  
“I think I’ll have some of that actually.”  
  
“Some of what?”  
  
“The food, Reynir, don’t get any ideas.”  
  
“Ideas about what?” Reynir always felt like he was missing something.  
  
Mikkel just sat down and started making himself a second sandwich. With some difficulty, Reynir fit his lips around the salami and took another bite. He really didn’t know how to classify how he was starting to feel about Mikkel being so protective of him. While Mikkel continued to nonchalantly eat his sandwich, Reynir’s brain turned over the image of his massive hands falling onto the shoulders of those Italian catcallers. He really was just a huge man, solid all over in a way you couldn’t argue with. His hairy, tattooed wrists were as thick as Reynir’s ankles, and the way his shirt stretched over his shoulders made it clear they had more meat in them than the average butcher’s display.  
  
Thinking about how meaty Mikkel was - just in general, about normal parts of his body that anyone might notice and think about - with this salami in his hand brought up some awkward thoughts. Reynir swallowed another mouthful of meat and felt like he might be starting to blush yet again. Sigrun choosing that moment to reappear was a very welcome distraction from whatever was going on here.  
  
“Hey, I wanted some of that!” Sigrun took the salami from Reynir’s hand, ripped the paper down and broke a squarish chunk off the end. Eating it like an apple, she made a slightly cartoonish noise of satisfaction.  
  
“You know, we have knives. Do neither of you know how to eat salami like a normal person?” Mikkel watched Sigrun’s destructive chowing with gentle bemusement.  
  
Sigrun ignored him. “Oh, man, I just remembered that when we get to Slovenia they have those cheese-meat-whatever pastries. _Barok? Burek?_ You ever had one of those? They’re like the size of a doormat…”  
  
Reynir had never eaten a doormat-sized pastry of any kind, and asking Sigrun for more details of her future meal plans was a perfect way to stop wherever that train of thought had been going. Hearing her talk made him regain some of his excitement about their next destination, and not just because getting off the busy Italian roads would be a relief. Sigrun had taken Mikkel’s phone and used it to show Reynir some pictures earlier. If those had been accurate, her description of parts of Slovenia as “Switzerland with the stick taken out of its arse” didn’t seem far off. Mikkel had once again only commented that if Reynir was this into mountains, he could have come much less far for them.  
  
Just before Genoa their path turned up through the mountains, crossing almost due east over the rest of the north of Italy. Reynir kept quiet for long enough that Mikkel and Sigrun started speaking in Danish and Norwegian to each other, and during a lull between CDs, Reynir found himself nodding off. When he woke up, the conversation was still continuing in the absence of any music, although the landscape had changed enough that Reynir was sure he must have slept for a while. “How long have we been driving?”  
  
“A while.” Mikkel broke off whatever he was saying to Sigrun to answer.  
  
“Fuckin’ ages! We went past Venice about half an hour ago. You missed a bunch.” Sigrun chimed in, waving her hand at the new set of distant mountains. “The good part’s starting though, we have a couple hours’ driving left. Hey, at least you won’t be too tired to help make dinner when we get there. You can wait that long, right?”  
  
“Oh, yeah. Sure.” Reynir blinked the sleep out of his eyes and stretched his legs as much as possible.  
  
“Hey, now that you’re awake.” Sigrun beckoned in the air. “We’re over 3 hours behind on music.”  
  
Reynir picked a CD at random and handed it forward. Whatever it was, Sigrun was pleased with it, so the three of them entered the foothills to the sound of a lot of flutes and screaming. As the afternoon heat soaked into the ground, the road outside got warm enough to shimmer. Storm clouds advanced and broke against the mountains, so as they gained elevation they found themselves under fat lashings of rain. Reynir craned forward to get a look through the bit of windshield that the wipers were keeping clearest. Slovenia’s mountain roads were stunning, but with Sigrun at the wheel, definitely not calming.  
  
“Fucking hell.” Sigrun skid again, taking another corner with a drift that might have been semi-intentional. Despite a lifetime of atheistic-leaning apathy, Reynir found himself mentally requesting of any listening god that they please stop the rain while Sigrun was on the road. Thankfully, the storm came down fast enough to exhaust itself quickly, and the rain cleared to reveal the valley below bathed in early evening light.  
  
“It’s so pretty!” Reynir again pressed himself against a side window. He remained there right up until the point that Sigrun turned up a yet smaller road, one with a sign advertising CAMPING and CABINS in English, German and what Reynir assumed was Slovene.  
  
Reynir tried his best to be helpful when he reached the campsite, carrying as much as his arms could hold from the car. He still wasn’t sure what his situation was going to be here, given presumably this was meant to be Sigrun’s solo holiday. When Sigrun asked him “Don’t you want to come look inside?”, he entered while trying to somehow silently project that he didn’t expect to be allowed in there again.  
  
The cabin itself was a slight surprise. Reynir was sure Sigrun had a tent. The explanation came when Sigrun started to outline her plans for the next couple of days, punctuating her speech with gestures towards the various things they had. “There’s our bathroom and tap in that hut across the path, look through the window where I’m pointing - _So_ , I booked this to keep most of my crap in while I take the tent and hike Triglav - Oh! We have a stove in here already! - Yeah Triglav, you remember that big mountain I pointed out on the way? I’ll be gone for a couple days. Don’t trash anything, we’re staying here for a couple more days after I get back.”  
  
“You’re leaving now?” Reynir could see the shadows getting longer, and was sure that Iceland’s mountains were not the only ones best approached during the day.  
  
“Nah, tomorrow morning.” Sigrun sat down in an ancient-looking wicker chair, placing her feet up on a little table. All the furniture in this everything-but-the-bedroom area looked about thirty years old, somehow both dusty and well-used at the same time. “I’ll be leaving with my stuff pretty much as soon as I wake up, so I guess one of us has to sleep on the floor. The bed’s only big enough for two - ”  
  
“Oh! I’ll take the floor!” Reynir said it as soon as he realised where the sentence was going. The guilt of having Mikkel and Sigrun look after him was starting to creep in again. While logically he knew that Sigrun had booked this totally of her own accord, and that probably this stuff was way less expensive in Slovenia, he still felt like by merely being here he was imposing terribly. He tried to alleviate the feeling by also volunteering to get water from the tap and start making everyone’s dinner.  
  
“Look at you, sitting on your arse while he helps.” Sigrun was not moving herself, aside from flicking bits of chair at Mikkel while she spoke.  
  
“He’ll just feel bad if I try to help him.” Mikkel was idly browsing the little pile of books that had been left on one table. He found one that appeared to be in German and opened it at random points, squinting at the odd sentence, before seeming to make up his mind and starting from the first page.  
  
Mikkel was, of course, totally right. Reynir had to wonder what other parts of his psyche were being read accurately. He didn’t know why the idea of Mikkel knowing what he was thinking bothered him exactly, and stopped worrying about it too much once he’d had a chance to be useful. Sitting outside to eat his macaroni from one of the chipped bowls he’d found in the cupboard, Reynir stretched out and enjoyed the last rays of sun on his legs. The low voice of a stream was coming from somewhere, and maybe tomorrow he’d get the chance to wade in it.


	12. It'll Never Be The Same

Slovenia was so warm that the cabin started to heat up even before Sigrun left in the morning. As the sun invaded, Reynir moved across the floor towards the shadow until he couldn’t anymore, and when he stepped out he followed the noise of the stream without bothering to put his shoes on. The ground was spikier than it looked, and Reynir trod through the woods on the balls of his feet, relieved by how cool the shadows of the trees were. When he found the stream, he made a skidding descent down the gravelly bank, and noticed that despite the heat the air around the water had a cool aura. Reynir dipped in a toe. The stream was so cold it felt like there should have been ice in it.    
  
Wading in a little way anyway, Reynir splashed his face then straightened up to take in the craggy, forested horizon and crystalline water. He must have been standing in the Alps’ snowmelt, and it flowed so fast that he was sure that sitting down would lead to him being dragged downstream. The feeling of the sun starting to prickle on his shoulders, while his feet went numb against the river-bottom rocks, was a strangely apt accompaniment to the scarcely-believable beauty he was standing in. Splashing himself again before leaving the river, Reynir started walking back towards the cabin in a good mood.    
  
When he found it again, it was empty. The door to the tiny bedroom had been left open, and most of Mikkel’s things were still lying around, but Mikkel himself was nowhere to be seen. Reynir wondered what exactly they were supposed to do here for two days. Now that he was finally by himself, he found his hands itched for the half-finished sock that had been in his bag. Whoever had stolen it had better appreciate the nice set of needles he’d accidentally given them.    
  
A heavy step outside, and the door opening, alerted Reynir to Mikkel’s return. He was carrying a box of wine in one hand and a shopping bag in the other. The latter ended up containing several of the pastries Sigrun had been describing yesterday, as well as a few cups that were shaped like wine glasses, but made of very thickly seamed plastic. Reynir watched as Mikkel pointed out their respective shares of the pastries, set one of the chairs up outside, then proceeded to strip down to his boxers. His general attitude, as he filled one of the plastic glasses with box wine and took his book outside with him, said that unlike Reynir he had entirely made up his mind about what kind of holiday he was having.    
  
Following him outside, Reynir already felt reluctant to interrupt the mid-morning wine sunbathing that was going on. “Er, where’d you find that stuff?”   
  
“There’s a corner store and a bakery down the road. Just walk along it for long enough after going right, you’ll find it.”   
  
“Ah. Thanks.” Reynir moved as if to go, despite having no idea what he would be doing at those shops with no money, then remembered he still hadn’t eaten breakfast. Turning back, he grabbed one of the pastries and put on his shoes before heading out the way they’d arrived. Once he’d found the way out, he set off up the side of the valley, munching at his breakfast and enjoying the sound of the odd forest bird. This pastry was made of many, many thin layers, each of which sandwiched some kind of tangy salad cheese. It was delicious, and the walk was so bright and pretty that Reynir almost forgot to feel guilty for again eating someone else’s food.    
  
It was strange to be alone for the first time in about a week, and stranger still to think that only that long ago, he’d been very much under the impression he knew what his immediate future held. He’d had his stuff, and his jeans had been intact, and he’d never met either of the people he was now totally dependent on. He had never met anyone that even resembled them, in fact. Reynir passed the corner store, then the bakery, without looking inside and continued down the road. Climbing up the side of the hill, he finally started to feel the effect of days and days on the road wearing off. His legs had needed this.    
  
Now that he’d started thinking about his situation, it was hard to stop. Reynir wondered what on earth would have happened to him had he never met Mikkel in the first place. Mikkel had rescued him from a horrible situation, and he had to give him real credit for that. Sure, the situation he had been rescued into had itself taken several bizarre turns, but it was definitely much better than getting rapidly more dehydrated crying in a parking lot. Mikkel just generally felt nice to be around, and the snark was starting to tickle more than it stung, and his protectiveness was really touching.    
  
Reynir still hadn’t worked out what exactly was being touched there, and he wasn’t going to any time soon, because his thought process was abruptly cut off when he tripped and fell down a rocky embankment. Landing on his barely-clad and minimally-padded butt left him dazed and blinking, and when he stood up he found one thigh horribly scraped and full of tiny rocks.    
  
It took most of a minute for the sting to kick in, and Reynir stood staring at the blood welling out of the big scrape for a minute more before realising he should probably go back and deal with this. Of course he would mess something up on their first really nice day. Starting the walk back, Reynir’s internal monologue took a turn towards berating himself for his general stupidity. While the road was still just as pretty, the fact he’d be returning to once again inconvenience Mikkel made it hard to appreciate.    
  
_ Stupid, stupid, stupid.  _ His self-admonishment continued through the campsite’s gates and all the way up the path to the cabin. When he finally reached it, Mikkel was still there with his book and his wine-glass, the wine box itself sitting in the shade under his chair. Mikkel looked up from his book and took in the sight of blood dripping down past Reynir's knee. Reynir maintained his awkward stance, hand half-raised in greeting, and in turn took in the sight of Mikkel’s expression morphing into concern. Mikkel was still enjoying the sun in only his boxers, and Reynir had never really noticed before how thick his chest hair was, even as far up as his collarbones. It was probably the obvious concern on Mikkel’s face, or a touch of sunstroke, that made Reynir suddenly feel so warm.    
  
“Oh, dear. You don’t have anything to clean that up, I suppose.” Mikkel dog-eared his page and placed the book on the ground. “Come on, I have a first aid kit in my things somewhere.”    
  
“Uh-huh.” Reynir followed him in a slight daze. Maybe he’d fallen down harder than he’d thought.    
  
Mikkel did indeed have a first aid kit, and with Reynir perched on the edge of the bed, he poked at the shredded skin with a little plastic stick. “There’s a few rocks that have really dug in here, so it’s going to sting a bit getting them out. Sorry.”    
  
“Oh, that’s fine. Uh, thank you.” Reynir sat on his hands and hoped he wasn’t getting any scabby drips on this sheet. For all he knew, that would be something else Sigrun had to pay for. “Ah!”    
  
“I did warn you.” Mikkel picked out the other offending rocks in quick succession, and Reynir had to be impressed by how gentle such a large pair of hands could be. Those big hands lightly touching his leg as they dabbed bloody dirt away and applied iodine brought back the warm feeling, and not only that. Reynir’s breath caught as he processed the fact that when Mikkel’s hairy knuckles grazed his upper thigh, his jorts felt suddenly tighter in a way that sunstroke definitely could not explain.    
  
“Um, I think, uh, that’s uh, enough, um, helping.” Reynir prayed that he wasn’t blushing too badly, pointedly ignoring the lifetime of ginger experience that told him he would be. “Thanks. Really. I just think I’m gonna uh, walk it off, now!” The last word took the kind of high-pitched turn Reynir had been trying to avoid, and he stood up.    
  
“Yes, good to get some air on it now it’s all cleaned up. Don’t think it’s worth trying to cover that. I’d keep sitting down for a moment though, you seem a bit out of it.” Mikkel’s tone hadn’t changed at all, and Reynir wondered if maybe this actually wasn’t as obvious as it felt.    
  
“Mm! Okay!” Reynir crossed his legs, carefully avoiding the freshly cleaned wound, and sat with his hands placed very primly on his knees.    
  
Mikkel stood up, and Reynir had to once again deal with how casually half-naked he was. His thighs being visible made it impossible to ignore how incredibly meaty they were. “I’ll be outside in my usual spot, alright?”   
  
“Mm-hmm.”    
  
Reynir continued to sit frozen in place after Mikkel left, stuck between two competing thoughts. The first was wondering whether it had been obvious how compromised Reynir had gotten the moment Mikkel started handling him. The second was wondering why it had happened in the first place.   
  
_ There is an easy answer to that, Reynir. _ His brain supplied this with a pithiness that was almost like Mikkel’s voice. As Reynir sat and thought about Mikkel’s huge yet tender hands for a bit longer, the effect they’d had on him became even more uncomfortably noticeable. Uncrossing his legs, he stood up. He definitely could do with that walk, although marching past Mikkel without a word didn’t help Reynir feel like he was acting normal.    
  
The Slovenian forest was not the worst place to go and realise things. Returning to the river he’d visited that morning, Reynir waded into the freezing water with a new appreciation, walking in as deep as he could without starting to fear being swept away. Standing nearly waist-deep on the smooth rocks, the sweat of a thirty-five degree day and the sting of his skinned thigh faded into numbness. His breath became shorter in the temperature shock, then evened out again as he adjusted, and somewhere over the rush of the water a forest bird sang.    
  
This was okay. Reynir realised with some relief he wasn’t actually at all upset about this. Sure, he felt like an enormous idiot for not noticing much sooner, and it was incredibly awkward given the circumstances, but as long as he didn’t make it weird this was fine. It wasn’t as if Reynir had ever thought he’d known everything about what he liked. He’d had one steady high-school girlfriend, and while they’d had a perfectly nice time together with an amicable parting, the tameness of it all made it very reasonable that he’d still be learning things about himself now.   
  
In the river, pristine and calm, this cool-headed assessment had seemed like the end of it. Unfortunately, upon his return, Mikkel looked Reynir up and down with a crooked eyebrow and asked if he’d really just gone and waded into the river with all his clothes on. Stammering to answer “um, yes, actually” brought Reynir right back to square one. The rest of the afternoon, avoiding being weird around Mikkel by avoiding him entirely, led into an evening where Reynir said that he would indeed like half of the bed. If nothing unusual was happening, sharing the bed would surely be the logical thing to do, or so Reynir had decided in one panicked moment.    
  
The long string of following moments, in which Mikkel got ready for bed and fell into a sound sleep next to him, were much less panicked but in Reynir’s mind no less awkward. Being aware of how Mikkel’s body made him feel only enhanced the effect of it, and the night was so warm that Reynir would have stripped had it been most other situations. He didn’t dare move to go find out the time, but it felt like hours spent lying there, trying desperately to stop thinking of Mikkel’s meaty arms for long enough to sleep. 


	13. The Cocksucker Club

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> My cockatiel ate the E key on my keyboard, and it's kind of difficult to write 3000 word fic chapters when you have to hammer the empty space under that key 5 times to make it work. Hopefully this won't kill my productivity much more than school has already, apologies in advance for any increase in typos caused by Dragon's destructive little beak. 
> 
> (boner klaxon) this chapter is a dicks out jobbie, be ye warned!

Reynir emerged into the early afternoon sunlight to find Mikkel back in his chair, with another box of wine open and his book looking nearly finished.    
  
“Sleeping Beauty finally awakens! I suppose it’s not like we have anything we have to do.”   
  
Despite knowing full well that the nickname was a joke, Reynir found himself wondering if there was any chance Mikkel did in fact think he was a beauty when he was sleeping. Of course he didn’t, and the fact Reynir’s brain went there was more than a bit sad. “Wow! You’re really getting through those boxes of wine!”   
  
Reynir’s total non-sequitur didn’t seem to bother Mikkel. “Well, it is about a fifth of the cost it is at home. Like I said, it’s not like there’s anything we’re meant to be doing.”    
  
“Oh, I guess. Kind of sucks I can’t go enjoy how cheap everything is. Not that I should complain, given it was my own fault, and really, really stupid, and, um.”    
  
“If you want some of the wine, you can ask.”   
  
“Oh! No, no, I wasn’t asking!”   
  
“I know.”    
  
Reynir looked at the other glasses still sitting in their plastic pack under Mikkel’s chair. It was true they didn’t have anything else they were meant to be doing. After ducking inside to get himself at least some amount of breakfast pastry, he sat down by Mikkel’s feet and accepted a cup, which Mikkel filled with easily enough to last Reynir a while. The wine was white, tangy and obviously barrel-scraping even to someone used to Icelandic lager, but sparkled in the sun enough for Reynir to feel like sitting out here with it was a treat. It struck him that this was another moment that just about approximated what he’d dreamed of when he had decided to go travelling.    
  
“Mikkel? Have you been here before? In Slovenia, I mean, not this one national park…”   
  
“A while ago, yeah. With Sigrun that time too, actually. She’d just made her team the season before, but still came with me to help out a friend’s band, and on the way to a show in Budapest we broke down, of course…”   
  
The budget-luxury fun of drinking white wine in the sun, and the long ramble of Mikkel’s story about the last time he’d been in Slovenia, was not exactly a distraction from the awkward thoughts Reynir had been starting to have about Mikkel. Indeed, as Reynir finished his first and second glasses of wine, he found himself more and more preoccupied by the closeness of Mikkel’s thigh to his face. Sitting where he was on the ground near Mikkel’s feet, he could so easily have leaned over and just pressed his face into the thick hair and muscle of his outer thigh. Or his inner thigh. Reynir gulped at the thought, and Mikkel paused in illustrating a detail of this long-past auto repair fiasco. “Reynir?”   
  
“Oh, nothing.” The fuzz in Reynir’s head seemed a little stronger than merely the wine would have produced. “Hey, have you been to the river yet? I’m, um, a bit warm. It’s nice there.”   
  
“I suspect you’re not wrong. Hey, why don’t we relocate? Lead the way.”   
  
Given the opportunity to help, Reynir leapt to his feet, stumbling a little as the effect of standing up for the first time after a few drinks rushed to his head. “Oh! I remember where there’s a good place to set up your chair!”    
  
Walking down through the woods, having to navigate upright, cleared Reynir’s head just enough for his steps to feel like they were bouncing across the forest floor. The buzz of not only being tipsy, but also having actually had one slightly good and helpful idea, made the still-hefty box of wine in his hand feel light. When the two of them reached the river shore, Mikkel set up his chair then waded into the river, the water making his boxers cling to the shape of him. Reynir sank down into Mikkel’s chair and poured himself another glass of wine.   
  
“It’s fucking freezing in here.” Mikkel splashed his face, bending over a little as he did so, and Reynir gulped half his glass of wine down at once. Mikkel then swam about, lying on his back and letting the current carry him downstream a little way before powering back up through the water. This was another thing that made Reynir continue to rapidly drink. Mikkel returning to their shore, hips and crotch all but shrink-wrapped by the sopping-wet underwear, had Reynir emptying his glass in one.    
  
“That’s my chair, you know. Come on, back on the floor.”   
  
Reynir did not know exactly how to label the feeling that bubbled up when Mikkel said that, but his body’s reaction did a lot of the work of labelling it for him. Reynir had not previously suspected that a statement like that might turn him on that much, and did not at all want to analyse how speedily he complied with Mikkel’s order. His “Sorry!” came out in a squeak, only made worse by the fact that when he looked up, Mikkel only looked like he felt a bit bad for him.   
  
“Reynir, I was joking. You can have it if you want.”   
  
“Well, um, I’m here now.” The fact Mikkel hadn’t actually intended to make Reynir move made the flushing on his neck even more embarrassing. “More wine?”   
  
“Oh, don’t mind if I do.” The awkwardness in the air dissipated as Mikkel flopped into his chair, poured himself more wine and began to let himself dry off in the sun.    
  
With Reynir deliberately not paying attention to Mikkel’s glistening chest hair, the conversation got back to normal. Reynir swam, and drank a bit more, and shared some stories that Mikkel seemed to find reasonably interesting. It was hard to see how any of Reynir’s stories could be interesting compared to Mikkel’s, but when Reynir veered into ranting during an impression of an American tourist bothering his family’s sheep, Mikkel was doubling up in laughter. Encouraged, Reynir shared more stories of the ridiculous things he’d known tourists to do in Iceland, and Mikkel seemed to find it very funny indeed when he imagined the constant exasperation of the Icelandic search-and-rescue.    
  
For their whole walk back to the cabin, Reynir’s thoughts wandered in a pleasant, woozy haze. When they finally got back, it was actually dark enough that they’d needed to find the lights. They’d been talking for so long, and so comfortably, that Reynir found himself wondering if perhaps it wouldn’t be such a bad idea to mention some of the things he’d been thinking about. Mikkel did seem nearly unflappable, after all, and always seemed so in control of the situation that surely some good would come of it. When their drinking continued with them sitting on the edge of the bed, Reynir finally blurted it out.    
  
“Hey, Mikkel.”    
  
“Mm?”   
  
“How do you um. So, you like boys … men ... yeah?”   
  
Mikkel paused midway through the movement of taking another sip of wine, and Reynir didn’t know how to read his sudden stillness. “That’s correct.”   
  
“Um. Can I ask, uh - how do you - how did you know that?”   
  
Mikkel’s tone was almost unnervingly level. “Not sure I’ve ever questioned it, to be honest.” Even drunk, Reynir could detect some real discomfort with this line of questioning. Maybe to get the right thing across, he needed to be more blatant.    
  
“I um, I was just thinking, you um. I’ve been…”   
  
“Oh, no. Reynir. Listen to me.” Mikkel turned to look at him, tone concerned and serious. “You don’t owe me anything. Really, I know there’s urban legends about hitch-hikers owing their drivers sex, but nobody  _ actually _ expects - ”    
  
“Hey, no!” Reynir interrupted in a panic. “I don’t think you think that! No, not at all! I just - just think you’re hot.” He should probably have done his usual thing of clapping a hand over his mouth and blushing after making a revelation like that. The idea of Mikkel thinking Reynir thought  _ that _ of him, though, was too mortifying not to correct. “I just asked like that because I, um, it’s not happened… I don’t know how to… God, I’m nearly twenty-one, how do I not have a handle on this? I’m sorry, I should shut up…”   
  
Mikkel squinted at Reynir as he trailed off, let him go quiet, then rolled his eyes while giving a sigh of relief. “Oh, so  _ that’s _ the conversation we’re having. That one’s easy. Reynir, you didn’t notice a thing when we picked up that awful Swedish twink and his boyfriend, did you?”   
  
“Um.” Reynir assumed Mikkel meant the nice Swedish guy with the perky butt. “No?”   
  
“Having a gaydar so bad you can’t even detect yourself happens. It’s not weird.”    
  
“Oh. I suppose.” Thinking about it in that light made Reynir feel extremely stupid again, but that was a feeling he was used to. If merely being as dumb as a post was what made this possible, Reynir supposed it really did all made sense.    
  
Reynir could feel the buzz in his head grow as Mikkel regarded him. Something had to break the silence. “Um, sorry for mentioning it. I guess you’re not interested.”   
  
“Oh? Why’s that?”   
  
Reynir shifted and glanced at the thick body beside his. “Well, I’m um. You’re all - like  _ that _ .” In waving his arm to gesture, Reynir brushed against Mikkel’s shoulder and gulped. “Like I said, you’re um, hot, and I can just not mention it again, so you don’t have to think about it any more - ”    
  
The feeling of a finger tucking a lock of hair behind his ear made Reynir’s eyes widen. Despite the softness of it, Mikkel’s voice was still droll when he spoke. “Don’t be ridiculous. Look at you. You’re like a young Dave Mustaine without the shitty personality.”   
  
Reynir stammered for a moment. “That’s a good thing?”   
  
“Mm-hmm.”    
  
Reynir didn’t know exactly when he made the decision to clamber into Mikkel’s lap and straddle his hips. It was one of those movements that you considered for far longer than a normal one, then sort of found yourself making in the same instant as being conscious of the decision. Mikkel did not look surprised, exactly, and took his time draining his glass before letting it fall down and placing his hands on Reynir’s thighs.    
  
“Oh, I don’t know what I’m doing.” Reynir said it almost to himself, but despite the whisper, at this close a range of course Mikkel heard it. The feel of a rough thumb starting to circle a patch of skin on his thigh was already making him feel tight and gooey at the same time, and another whisper came out with “I’ve only ever been with girls before - ”   
  
“I did get that, don’t worry.” Mikkel ran his hands up, hooking a thumb into the bottom of Reynir’s jorts and sliding his other hand to the back to squeeze. “If you don’t feel okay…”   
  
“I liked it when you told me to get off your chair earlier.” Again light-headed in a way the wine could only be at most 50% responsible for, Reynir blurted it out breathlessly, with no real plan of what he wanted Mikkel to take from it.    
  
The hand on Reynir’s buttock tightened. “Elaborate.”   
  
“Ah! Um!” Reynir squirmed, hyper-conscious of the breadth of the man he was straddling and the dull throb starting to press against the fly of his jorts. “I, I liked, I don’t know, when I thought you were telling me…”   
  
“When you thought I was bossing you around? Oh, well, that is interesting.” Mikkel’s tone became more measured and deliberate, and Reynir felt like his cock might burst through his jorts if this got any worse. All he could do was nod, wondering how just some hands on his thighs could do this to him, and shiver when those hands also started purposefully exploring up his shirt. Scrabbling his hands up, Reynir dug them into Mikkel’s chest hair and clung on for dear life. Mikkel’s hands were in his hair, on his neck, and moving his chin up so his neck could be adeptly tongued. Reynir went limp into the arms holding him and moaned when one broad thumb ground into his rock-hard nipple.   
  
Mikkel held Reynir’s head steady, brought his lips to his ear, and muttered in it with a hot breathiness. “On the floor.”   
  
Reynir whimpered, his cock once again throbbing in response. The reaction he’d had earlier by the river had been nothing compared to this. Sliding down between Mikkel’s legs, he let Mikkel pull his shirt off him as he went. He still had no idea what he was doing, but the thick hair of Mikkel’s inner thighs on his cheeks and the musk of another man’s cock near his face was so mind-consuming he couldn’t quite care. When Mikkel took Reynir firmly by his hair and pulled his own cock out of his boxers, Reynir grabbed at it with both hands, feeling the heft of the shaft and finding himself unable to breathe for a second.    
  
“I don’t know what I’m doing.” Once again, Reynir said it so softly he wasn’t sure he meant to say it out loud at all.   
  
“You’ll try, though, won’t you?” Mikkel placed a finger under Reynir’s chin and tilted it up, then slid a thumb into his mouth to open it slightly. Wide-eyed, Reynir nodded. “Good boy.”   
  
“I feel like a dog when you say that.” Reynir had to mumble around the fingers in his mouth. None of these things made Reynir any less hard or pink-faced. Quite the opposite.   
  
“Mm, yes. You’d suit a collar.”   
  
Reynir’s answering whine of frustration probably told Mikkel all he needed to know about the effect that had. Letting his head be angled up, Reynir half-closed his eyes as the tip of Mikkel’s cock touched his tongue. It was musty, and salty, and Reynir felt himself flush with warmth again as his lips slid down over the fat head of it. His head being firmly worked forwards down Mikkel's shaft made him feel again like the button might be about to pop off his jorts, but when he tried to fumble them open himself, Mikkel took Reynir’s hands and placed them again around the shaft of his own cock. “Not yet.”   
  
Reynir could only gasp and shiver as he learned to wrap his mouth around Mikkel's cock, making endless little noises of frustration as its tip against his throat brought tears to his eyes. Every moment of his face being held tight and his mouth used made him feel like he was going to explode if he couldn’t touch himself, but Mikkel’s “good...” and “just a little more, here we go…” were so gratifying every time he couldn’t help but follow. His jaw was starting to ache when he finally worked out the rhythm to it, and he realised as he tasted ever-fatter drops of pre-cum that he was going to have to swallow it. He choked a little when he finally finished Mikkel off, gulping it down as it came and feeling like he’d just emerged from a weird dream.    
  
“Can I touch myself yet?” Reynir asked it in a low whisper, wiping the tears from his cheeks and half expecting the answer to be no. He wasn’t sure if the prospect of being denied made it worse or better.    
  
Mikkel pulling him back up into his lap and delving his tongue into Reynir’s cum-lined mouth was almost mean, with how it made Reynir squirm and moan. Mikkel slowly stroking where the tip of Reynir’s cock bulged in his jorts was very definitely mean. “Mikkel!”   
  
“Say please.”   
  
“Please! Please,  _ please _ \- ”   
  
Reynir kept begging for good measure as his jorts were unzipped and Mikkel started to stroke him. He had no dignity left here, sitting in Mikkel’s lap and burying his face in his shoulder, and tried so hard to hold on for just a few minutes. Mikkel was good at this, though, and had been even better at riling Reynir up before. Reynir’s mind went blank as his cock jerked in Mikkel’s hand, his orgasm leaving him clinging to Mikkel again and keening, and when it was finally over his head buzzed in a way that reminded him that he was still quite drunk.    
  
“Have fun?” Mikkel peeled Reynir off his torso and held him up, as if inspecting him.    
  
“Mm-hmm.” Reynir nodded in a daze, feeling like he might collapse if Mikkel let go of him. Crawling off Mikkel’s lap, he lay down on the bed and took several deep breaths. “Was I good?”   
  
“Hm? Oh. Yes, that was fun.”    
  
The casualness of Mikkel’s tone felt oddly upsetting. Reynir wasn’t sure what he was meant to do now. He felt like usually after sex you did the cuddling, and talked about the next day, and things like that. Mikkel seemed quite uninterested in anything of that nature, putting his cock away and looking for his wine glass again as if not much had happened.    
  
“You alright, Reynir?”   
  
“Oh, yeah, just kinda tired.” Reynir lied too quickly to think about why he was doing it. “Hey, um, what’s happening tomorrow?”   
  
“Sigrun’s coming back, I suppose, and we’ll have to go through a lot more hiking in the forest.”   
  
“Oh. Cool.” Reynir fumbled around, looking for his shirt. Technically, Mikkel’s shirt. Remembering that made him slightly sad again in a way he couldn’t place, but it was probably mostly the booze starting to level out. He did up his jorts, got himself a drink of water, and copied Mikkel in trying to find another book to read till he could sleep.    
  
  



	14. Bunnies

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Maybe I should stop bothering to warn for chapters having horny content. I think the rest of this fic is going to have a fair bit of it, this one included. Is anyone benefiting from the content notes?

  
“Good morning boys!” Sigrun crashed through the cabin’s front door sounding as if her two-day hike had not tired her out at all.  
  
“Ugh.” Mikkel sat up in bed, and Reynir supposed he would also be obliged to move soon. He had been awake for the last few hours, thinking about what had happened yesterday, unsure if Mikkel was still too asleep to be worth disturbing. Last night, he had passed out and slept like the dead, but awaking in the early hours lad left him slightly too much time to lie there and mull over his life. Reynir couldn’t work out if Mikkel's attitude after their encounter had meant they wouldn't be doing that again, and if not, why not.  
  
“What have you two been up to while I was away?” Sigrun's face appeared in the bedroom, and Mikkel made a vague hand-waving gesture at her question.  
  
“Not much.”  
  
Reynir stayed quiet. If Sigrun noticed his weird mood, she was doing well at hiding her reaction. He suspected she actually just didn't notice.  
  
“Great! So you'll be well rested for the day plan I have! I'm gonna sit down for a couple of hours and then there's a little trail we can do this afternoon…”

  
The “couple of hours” were mostly spent with Sigrun directing them towards small tasks (“what do you mean you haven't cooked since I left?”) and showing them a detailed catalogue of every photo she'd taken on her way up Triglav. Reynir felt more tired out by her presentation of the pictures than Sigrun seemed to be by actually having climbed high enough to take them.  
  
“Remember the people you could see ahead of me before? Here’s how far behind they were after I overtook them… and here’s how far back they were 20 minutes later...”  
  
Reynir found himself yawning, suppressed it, and thought again about the fact that Sigrun was planning on taking them walking somewhere all afternoon. He began to really wish he’d slept a bit more.  
  
“Getting bored, Pippi? I thought you loved mountains.”  
  
“Oh. Um, I do. I just didn’t sleep well.” Now that she’d commented, Reynir was actually surprised at himself. It was a bit uncomfortable to realise how distracted he was today.  
  
“That’s because you’ve been sitting on your butt all day! Just you wait till tonight after the trek I planned for everyone…”  
  
After helping prepare some of the harsh coffee and following Sigrun down the path for half an hour or so, Reynir did find himself properly waking up. He also found himself cheering up, the hill climb filling his lungs with fresh air and his ears with the sound of birds. It was mind-blowing how long the trees went on for, and when Reynir remarked on this to Sigrun, she barked with laughter. “Oh yeah! You don’t have any forest over there, do you? I’d _die_ , sounds horrible having the landscape all naked and weird-looking… still not as bad as Denmark, of course.”  
  
“Stockholm syndrome. Nobody actually enjoys having to catch their breath halfway through going up the road.” Mikkel’s response sounded like he was also embracing the good mood, and Reynir wondered if that meant he was still feeling okay about what they’d done last night. Climbing in silence for a while, Reynir had to admit it still really bothered him not knowing what exactly that had been. He’d have to find the chance to actually ask Mikkel later..  
  
On their break at the peak of another wooded hill, Reynir continued to try to analyse Mikkel’s mood. Mikkel really seemed to be doing nothing more than chilling out and enjoying the view. Probably he was so unflappable that he expected everyone to take things in stride just as much as he did. Well, if that was what Mikkel wanted, that was what Reynir was going to do. He’d already annoyed Mikkel enough by being freaked out by things that weren’t worth it, so it was time to push down any weird reactions he was having and be chill for once. Deciding this felt like some kind of weight off his chest, and Reynir almost felt like he was skipping on the long descent back to camp.  
  
“You’re in a good mood.” Mikkel remarked as they found the cabin again.  
  
“Yep!” Reynir beamed at him, the feeling of wind in his hair as he’d trotted down the hillside still lifting his spirits. “This is a great holiday after all, I’m having fun!”  
  
The tiny pause before Mikkel said “Good to hear” kicked Reynir’s overanalysing brain back into action with the suddenness of a clunky old clothes dryer starting its final cycle. This time, there was a lot more hope tumbling around in there with the socks and lint. Maybe if he could stick to his plan of acting chill about whatever this was, he could get a repeat of the previous night.  
  
Luckily, he got a chance to find out how well that would work very quickly. Sigrun, aghast at the fact they could have been using the hob to fry things here and had been neglecting the opportunity, had gone to procure some meat. Reynir felt a bit dry-mouthed and warm-faced even thinking about bringing this up directly, but pushed through his own awkwardness with a single-minded force.  
  
He found Mikkel sitting on the bed going through the books again, and leaned against the doorframe with a carefully nonchalant expression he’d previously only drawn on when trying to lie to his mum. It had even worked on her once or twice, so he knew it was a good one. “So, since Sigrun’s gone to get some meat.”  
  
“Mm?” Mikkel put down the book he’d been poking through and looked up at Reynir, immediately catching the way Reynir’s gaze was probing his body. “Oh, I see.”  
  
“Uh.” Reynir was very sure his awkward staring had communicated exactly what he wanted, but still owning up to it in words felt a bit rude.  
  
“You’d like to do the same, then.”  
  
Reynir opened his mouth to ask what Mikkel meant, then closed it as he realised with a groan what an awful meat-based pun he’d just heard. As Reynir narrowed his eyes and huffed, Mikkel’s mouth curved slightly in satisfaction at how offensively bad a joke he’d made.  
  
“...Yeah.”  
  
The look Mikkel was giving Reynir was hard to read. Analytical, maybe, although whether it was searching for Reynir’s motive or merely the chance to make another terrible joke was unclear. “You seem to be having fun today.”  
  
“I had fun yesterday too.” Was this too sincere a thing to admit at this point? Reynir kept his tone light, shrugging his shoulders as if last night hadn’t involved the discovery of about eight new levels of being turned on.  
  
Mikkel’s smile became a little softer. “Good.”  
  
There was something thrilling about the furtive feeling of jerking Mikkel off, knowing full well that Sigrun might come back at any point and interrupt them. Reynir couldn’t stop wondering about how embarrassing it might be to be caught doing this. Even his best innocent face wouldn’t do a thing to explain away the fat handful of cock, or the obvious erection straining against his jorts as Mikkel finished all over his fingers. The excitement transformed quickly into horrible frustration as a bag clunked down against the tiny deck outside, making Mikkel jump back from fondling Reynir’s crotch and leaving Reynir squirming with an obvious whine.  
  
At least hearing Sigrun’s voice again brought Reynir back to reality a bit. Undoing the knot keeping his shirt at his waist, he let the loose fabric fall down past the hem of his jorts, hiding the state he was in and hopefully giving Sigrun no hint of what they’d been up to. Reynir was pretty sure Sigrun caught nothing of Mikkel’s ghost of a smirk when she announced it was time for a sausage party.  
  
Cooking, then washing up, left plenty of time for Reynir to start feeling anxious again. The question of what exactly he was playing at here was haunting him again. Did Mikkel like him, as a person? Of course it would be stupid to read much into their two intimate encounters so far, but it was hard to stop thinking a lot about it, when this man had saved him from who knows what and been so extremely kind ever since. Mikkel’s earlier insistence that Reynir didn’t actually owe him anything was somehow hitting Reynir in the feelings harder than anything else.  
  
Reynir finished the washing up, and saw Mikkel was settling into another book. The look of casual concentration on his face, peaceful with a hint of intensity, was another thing that made Reynir feel in ways he was hesitant to classify. Rather than letting himself fall into another pit of overanalysis, Reynir decided to take a walk, and after saying so to Mikkel and Sigrun set off into the dusky forest behind their cabin. He had not been walking long when he heard steps following him, and turning, saw the wide-shouldered figure of Mikkel approaching.  
  
Reynir did not mention that he had actually gone for a walk to get away from thinking about Mikkel, nor did he correct the assumption that he still wanted his turn after earlier, and when Mikkel asked “are you alright?” the enthusiastic “yep!” Reynir gave must have been convincing. It wasn’t long before Reynir was glad he’d said it, as being pressed against a tree and shushed - Mikkel’s fingers cupping Reynir’s jaw and a thumb on his lower lip - made him forget almost instantly why he’d been feeling weird. His hips being roughly pinned against the bark while his jorts were unzipped made him yowl, and Mikkel shushing him again made Reynir feel warm all over, despite the cooling night air. When Reynir finally realised where Mikkel’s head was going, his gasp and shudder was dramatic enough to make Mikkel pause, half-kneeling in front of him with a quizzical expression.  
  
“I didn’t expect this.” Reynir took several fast, shallow breaths and tentatively touched Mikkel’s hair, wondering if it was allowed to grip it hard.  
  
“You’ve been very good” was all Mikkel said, before delicately fishing Reynir’s cock out of his jorts. Reynir leaned back against the tree and closed his eyes, biting his lip as he felt the wet warmth of lips and tongue on his cock.  
  
“Oh, fuck, you’re good at that” he whispered, but heard no response. His knees felt like they would surely stop working at any minute, but his hips were still being held firmly in place, and somehow he managed to keep his legs straight as his jorts were pulled down so gentle fingers could caress his balls. The tip of Mikkel’s tongue on the head of his cock was so precise and unhesitating, and Reynir clenched his teeth before sliding a hand up to his mouth to silence himself, breath shallow and gasping. The first sound Mikkel made was a small grunt of satisfaction as Reynir covered his mouth tightly and shivered. Reynir really tried to hold back and make it last a little longer, but he had about as much chance of that as the proverbial snowball in hell.  
  
When Reynir was done, the night air felt colder than it had before. While it wasn’t as though he’d been keeping a ranking in his head, he had to acknowledge that was by far the best blowjob he’d ever had in his life. “Oh. Wow. Thank you.” He must have sounded even more useless than usual, his breath so hard to catch it was like it was running away from him.  
  
“You’re welcome”, said Mikkel, straightening up and lightly brushing the dirt off his jeans. “Are you coming back to the cabin?”  
  
“Uh.” Reynir didn’t know how anyone could be expecting him to make decisions after that. When he moved his legs, he almost dropped to the floor from how wobbly holding them artificially stiff had made them. “Should I?”  
  
“Likely wise, yes.”  
  
“Mm-hmm. Okay.”  
  
Reynir’s sudden fear about being relegated to the floor again turned out to be unfounded, as Sigrun’s tent was now available and offered to him. He took it gratefully, the offer of a private space definitely easier to handle than just being told to get back on the floor. While the fact of sleeping there didn’t bother him, he really didn’t want to go back to the floor after having gotten to share Mikkel’s bed. Lying in Sigrun’s sleeping bag, a few of the demons of anxiety started to haunt him again, but luckily Sigrun’s words about sleeping well after a day in the hills were true.


	15. Interlude 3: Freewheel Burning

“Right, that’s everything.”  
  
Mikkel stuck his head back into the cabin, just to be sure. Reynir was still poking around in there, looking for God knows what. While Reynir had been very pleasantly surprising amounts of fun in the past few days, he continued to act in line with Mikkel’s first impression of him in a somewhat irritating percentage of situations. Well, he didn’t always have to always act like the brightest bulb in the pack to be good company. Mikkel could tell that behind the awkward, attention-deficit tendencies Reynir was actually a pretty smart guy. It would be nice if that ever came out when they were trying to get something done, but at least today wasn’t terribly urgent.  
  
“Rey- _niiiiiir_!” Sigrun’s voice sounded out from the car, as uncompromising in volume as ever. “Get your skinny little butt into the car or we _will_ leave you behind!”  
  
Reynir jumped at the sound of Sigrun’s empty threat, knocking himself against the doorframe as he scrambled out of the cabin. “Coming!”  
  
With the car loaded up and Sigrun maneuvering it out of the campsite, the pleasant feeling of being on a road trip could finally resume. It felt a little more complete than the last leg had, as Mikkel generally held that it didn’t properly count as a road trip until two of the travellers started screwing each other. Usually he was the one placing bets on who it would be, and ideally collecting some money from Sigrun in the process, but this outcome was good too. Not as good as the time he’d watched Sigrun internally struggle for three days, in obvious mental pain over whether to sleep with a girl at the expense of her own bet on said girl not going for anyone. Also not as good as winning a pack of beer from both her and from another observer. That person had wagered that not even the fact the girl looked like a glam metal album cover could get Sigrun to voluntarily lose a bet, a judgement on Sigrun's impulse control that mystified Mikkel to this day.  
  
There wasn’t much that was as good as that long-ago road trip had been, though, and while Mikkel didn’t look forward to job hunting again when he arrived home, he felt quite peaceful about the upcoming trip up through Germany. Even the knowledge of Sigrun’s special bag of “autobahn-only CDs” did little to crack his good mood.  
  
Hearing Reynir squeak as Sigrun drifted around another hairpin bend did make Mikkel wonder if perhaps this was not the best environment for her usual driving style. There wasn’t going to be any stopping her, though. If anything, making her think about it too hard might be the more dangerous thing, so Mikkel settled into watching the view. As much as he knew he had to go find a new job soon, it was sad to be leaving this place. The forest’s deep shadows and freezing streams sprawled out under the summer heat as broadly and contentedly as a cat, and the little buildings tucked into every valley seemed to themselves be contentedly half-asleep.  
  
The peace was not to last. Sigrun’s head, turned back to start instructing Reynir on a new choice of CD, did not return to face the road fast enough to see quite how loose the gravel was ahead. Mikkel braced himself against the door as he felt his stomach lurch along with the car’s movement, Sigrun’s attempts to control the vehicle only slowing it as it careened offroad, bouncing and pulverising the undergrowth before stopping only barely short of a massive tree trunk.  
  
“ _Shit-piss-fuck-shit-son-of-a-fuuu--uck!_ ” Sigrun was gripping the wheel with tight hands. “Oh, fuck me, it’s been a while since that happened.” She took several deep breaths, throwing some additional Norwegian curses into her calm-down routine. “Shii- _iit_! No damage though, I think! We all good?”  
  
“Oh, oh my God. Maybe we should lay off the um, the power metal?” Reynir’s voice was extremely high-pitched.  
  
“Mikkel? You good?” Sigrun tentatively took one hand off the wheel and poked him. “Hey, it wasn’t that bad, what’s up? You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”  
  
  
**Copenhagen, 2002** ****  
****  
****  
“I will never stop being jealous of that bike.” Mikkel looked out the cafe window and again regarded the motorbike, which his brother had parked alongside Mikkel's own by the damp, grey kerb. It was somewhat fitting, of course, that Michael had gotten hold of such a beautiful model while Mikkel was still constantly picking pieces of his bike off the road. Michael had come into this world first by the slimmest of margins, but even that small head start had left him easily the better of them ever since.  
  
“Well, I guess you’d better start hoping I die in a horrible accident, because that’s the only way you’re getting it.” Michael continued to peer at his reflection in the window, fixing his helmet hair with a few practised flicks of his fingers.  
  
"Ooh, good idea. Maybe try to die of alcohol poisoning or something, so you won't damage the bike..."  
  
“Are you two going to actually order anything else?” The seemingly sole employee of this coffee shop was pointedly cleaning the tables near the two of them, looking like she was getting ready to clean everything else as well. “Because if you aren’t having coffee, I can close the machine down, you know…”  
  
“I did want another coffee actually. Sorry. Black and large, thanks.” Michael flashed her his best smile, and got a mere eyeroll rather than real frustration back.  
  
“Suppose you’re going to need some energy tonight.” Another thing that Mikkel was jealous of was the fact Michael had managed to get the night off work for the party they’d co-organised, while Mikkel’s own boss had insisted that nobody else could be found for his late evening shift.  
  
Michael just shrugged and rose from his chair, heading to the counter to pick his coffee up, then returned and began to drink it down hot with tentative little sips. “There’s a lot of people who can’t make it, to be honest.”  
  
“You don’t have to try to make me feel better. It wouldn’t even be so bad if it wasn’t for having to spend the evening listening to _fucking Bruno_ again…”  
  
“Have you ever had a boss you actually liked?”  
  
“I have! Remember Agneta, who liked me until dog-sitting her dog ended up going terribly…”  
  
“Oh, that was a good dog.”  
  
“I still kind of regret that being a _was_ now.”  
  
“It’s not like it was exactly your fault.”  
  
“I also regret not being able to look Agneta in the eye anymore. Even if the lobster costume was kind of itchy, she was a great boss.”  
  
“You’ll find another Agneta one day! Till then, good luck with _fucking Bruno_ , I guess. I gotta get going.” Michael finished the last of his coffee at the same palate-scalding speed and returned the cup to the counter, prompting a “oh, thanks!” from the waitress who had started clearing the machine out. Mikkel followed him when he picked up his helmet and left, taking his own helmet from the table as well and leaving her in peace. He watched Michael kick his bike into gear before shooting off down the road. When the silhouette of his shoulders - distinguishable from Mikkel’s only by the different arrangement of patches on his leather jacket - was no longer visible through the spring drizzle and coming dusk, Mikkel got on his own bike with quiet resignation. There were many things he hated about this job, and having to go nearly 10km south of here to Kastrup airport was another one of them.  
  
Getting through security, clocking in, and shedding the jacket and jeans for his only-just-uncomfortably undersized kitchen whites, Mikkel applied himself with yet more resignation to the start of his shift. At least he wasn’t on front of house anymore, after replying slightly too honestly to some horrendously English man who had come to this glorified sandwich microwave point expecting a stupid-question-humouring service. To be fair to him, had it been a place that mostly served Danes, Mikkel's response would have been considered about acceptable. While that was all quite regrettable, it was true now that in the rare event of it being slow here, he could at least put headphones on while he cleaned dishes.  
  
It was not slow, of course. Kastrup was forever a disaster, and the chaos concentrated itself on where harried people could attempt to refuel and thus exude stress with even more energy. Mikkel mostly blanked the negative emotion filling the air - if only he could do that to the four hundred new colds brought near him every week - and concentrated on keeping his head down.  
  
“Hey, is that your phone buzzing in the cloakroom?” One of Mikkel’s colleagues, a young woman named Sofie who took customer rudeness to heart so much that she could probably have done with a back-of-house place too, poked him as she passed. “Sounds like your ringtone. Unless someone from the other cafe has one of those fancy-ringtone ones now...”  
  
“Entirely possible.” Mikkel knew he couldn’t answer it, either way. As she went back out front, that fact started to bother him a bizarre amount. Why he felt so strange all of a sudden, Mikkel didn’t know.  
  
“Mikkel!”  
  
Michael’s well-wishes had, of course, affected nothing. Here he was again, _fucking Bruno_ popping in to contribute nothing but hot air, his excessive hairgel as ever failing to convince anybody that he was under forty.  
  
“Mikkel. Sofie’s had to go home, so you’re going to be holding everything down for the time being…”  
  
“Oh, what did you make her do now?” Mikkel already had three trays of dishes in a queue, and the dishwasher clearly had some filter in it that needed cleaning if it was going to act as anything but a bits-redistributing machine, and he could tell that he would not have time to even attempt that task before closedown. The prospect of fighting a slowly losing battle with the dish queue due to some past shift’s negligence already had him close to properly annoyed.  
  
“No need for that tone. Just try to keep on top of everything…”  
  
“I didn’t agree to be turned into an octopus.”  
  
“What?”  
  
“I only have two arms, Bruno.”  
  
“Well, _I_ only have one employee at this station!”  
  
Mikkel knew there was no point in reminding Bruno that he was perfectly able to do the dishes himself, if his constant corrections to Mikkel’s method were any indication. Jamming as many sandwich-cheese-crusted plates into the machine as possible, Mikkel turned it on and went out to the front. He could hear his phone ringing again, somewhere in the background.  
  
It again bothered him in a way he couldn’t explain.  
  
Rushing between the cash register and the dishwashing station ate up time fast. As it got later, Bruno pitched in with clearing plates from tables just enough to keep the place functioning. Mikkel being intensely on edge was probably normal, given the amount of stress he was under. Letting it go was harder than usual, though, and it showed. He hadn't actually needed to be as snarky to that last customer as he had been.  
  
“Mikkel, what did I tell you about _politely_ directing people to the money exchange?” hissed Bruno when they met again in the kitchen. “And you _know_ we can take their money and just exchange it later, if they’re being really…”  
  
“You’d think they’d be aware they’d left America, what with having gotten on a plane and all.” Despite - or perhaps because of - the tension that had slowly spread across Mikkel’s chest in the past few hours, his tone was so jovial Bruno found it immediately infuriating. Unlike Mikkel, when he replied in anger his tone matched his mood exactly.  
  
“Look, if you don’t want this job, I think it would be better you leave it. The moment this shift is over - ”  
  
Mikkel didn’t bother letting him finish, handing his apron over and immediately turning towards the kitchen's back door.  
  
“I _said_ when this shift is over!”  
  
“I know you did.” Mikkel was already pulling off the top half of his kitchen whites as he entered the cloakroom. His phone was ringing for a third time, and he picked it up still leaning against the wall half-dressed, tuning out Bruno’s whining. The number didn’t seem to be one of his contacts.  
  
“Hello?”  
  
“Hello, this is Rigshospitalet trauma centre. Are you Mikkel Madsen?” An even-toned woman's voice that Mikkel didn't recognise at all.  
  
“Yes?”  
  
“And you are a close relative of Michael Madsen?”  
  
Mikkel had never before experienced an emotional state so totally defined by the lack of feelings. It was like holding your breath while swimming up through water, unsure when your head would break the surface and give you the chance to breathe, everything held taut until the correct response could become clear. “He’s my twin brother. How did you get this number?”  
  
“Standard protocol is to look at ID and contact numbers found on someone’s person, and this was the most recently dialled number we found. There’s been a motorcycle accident - ”  
  
Mikkel stood in silence as it was explained to him that he would not be expected to look at the body directly, as photographs of tattoos would suffice for a positive ID. _We try to make this process minimally traumatic, you won’t be expected to do anything like in the movies._ How interesting, Mikkel thought. He supposed it made sense they did it like that.  
  
“Can you come down reasonably soon?”  
  
“Oh. Yeah. Now, if you want.” Mikkel sounded almost chipper about it.  
  
“Alright. The address is Blegdamsvej 9, if you make yourself known to a member of front-desk staff...”  
  
The call ended. Mikkel looked around him, calmly farewelled his former boss, and dressed in his normal clothes again. Once in the parking lot, he stood by his bike, contemplating the underwhelming drizzle misting his hair and coating the bike’s cover. The city lights in the distance gave the foggy air and clouds a faint glow, through which no stars could be seen. In the background, the on-and-off roaring of planes landing came, then went, seven or eight times.  
  
On the train from the airport to town, Mikkel called his parents. Hopefully, that conversation would never be usurped as the worst one of his life.


	16. Total Entertainment

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A two-chapter day! It's been a while since I managed that. Maybe I can start updating properly regularly again...

Reynir took several deep breaths. “Oh, oh my God. Maybe we should lay off the um, the power metal?”  
  
Sigrun was totally ignoring Reynir, poking Mikkel and badgering him about why he looked so shocked. Reynir sank back against the seat and massaged the little welt that had been cut into his neck by the seatbelt as they’d careened off road. Mikkel just brought his palm to his forehead and ran his hand down, briefly pressing on his eyelids and sighing deeply. He sounded a great deal calmer than Reynir felt when, after a brief pause, he replied with “Christ, Sigrun, one day your driving is actually going to kill us all. Can I take the wheel till we get onto a better road?”  
  
For once, Sigrun didn’t contest it. “Yeah, do that actually.”  
  
Reynir just closed his eyes and let his heart rate slow as the two of them swapped places. The driver’s seat pushed back against Reynir’s legs as Mikkel got into it and adjusted it, so he moved across to sit behind Sigrun again. It was easiest to give into being tossed around as Mikkel performed some kind of nine-point turn to get them facing back up the small embankment, but Reynir’s eyes still caught it first when a light started to blink on the dashboard. “Uh, Mikkel? I don’t think that light means anything good.”  
  
Mikkel glanced down at it and swore. “Oh, one of the fucking wheels has gone flat. Whatever - I guess the ground’s hard enough to get the jack working under the car, so - ”  
  
“I... forgot to replace my spare.” Sigrun said, and cringed at the face Mikkel made. “Ah, shit. I’m sorry, man.”  
  
“Okay, let’s just… we’ll work something out.”  
  
The conversation in the car stalled for a long moment, the engine still dully rumbling, then going silent as Mikkel shut it off. Reynir got out of the car and circled it, looking for the offending wheel. “Oh, yeah, that’s super blown. I can see the sagging already.”  
  
“No chance of driving on it for a bit, just to get somewhere a bit more...?” Sigrun got out and looked as well. “Oh. Yep, there it fucking goes.”  
  
Mikkel was the last to get out and inspect the damage, and his sigh as he came to the same conclusion as Sigrun and Reynir was bone-weary. “Does the map say anything about an auto repair place?”  
  
“Nope.”  
  
“There’s one in the next village” said Reynir, then wondered why he had.  
  
Sigrun flipped the map over. “D’you mean the last one? The one just as we got out of the park’s boundaries?”  
  
“Um, no.” Reynir was now confused as to how to explain his conviction. “You know what, never mind.”  
  
“The next one along does look a bit bigger than the last one.” Sigrun had flipped the map again and was peering at what must have been the next village. “It’s about the only good bet, given I saw no sign of anything in the last one.”  
  
“Reynir, I was sure you hadn’t been here before.” Mikkel looked a lot more skeptical.  
  
“Oh, um, I haven’t. Forget it. I guess Sigrun’s right that it’s the best bet we have, though.”  
  
“Yep! Guess we might as well get walking!” Sigrun pulled a bag out of her things in the back seat and began to stuff it with snacks and their half-full water bottles.  
  
“Bringing the tire might be a good idea. I'm not sure it’ll be easy to communicate what we want otherwise.” Mikkel also began to search around. “Where’s the jack?”  
  
Reynir felt, for once, reasonably useful as he assisted in getting the tire off. “Oh, carrying this the whole way is going to suck.”  
  
“It’s no real problem.” Mikkel shouldered the deflated tire and sighed again as he contemplated the road ahead. “Sigrun, how far was it? Ten kilometers?”  
  
“About.”  
  
“Assuming we have any luck with a place being there, the biggest issues will be walking through the tunnel ahead and getting back before dark, I guess.”  
  
Sigrun turned to Reynir. “I think nobody’s going to try anything with the car given you can’t even drive it now, just stash everything out of sight and we’ll get going.”  
  
At least Reynir couldn’t fault the walk for prettiness. It wasn’t too far from the scenery they’d been climbing hills for only the other day. The forest, still thick and shadowy right up to the edge of the road, kept his shoulders from burning yet again as they walked for some time. Cars passed, and Sigrun tried a few times to hail them down, but those who responded just gestured at the available seats in their cars and shrugged. Nobody had space for three tall people and a deflated tire.  
  
Mikkel didn’t even bother asking anyone else to carry the dead tire, seemingly lifting it as if it was no heavier than a kitten. Reynir walked behind him, watching the slight movement of his steps slowly transfer little patches of dirt from the tire to the shoulders of his ever-present cutoff jacket. He could probably have lifted Reynir just as easily, and with the amount of time Reynir was spending just walking behind him, the constant slight tension of Mikkel’s beefy tricep steadying the tire became unavoidably fascinating. Reynir was still wondering if whatever was going on between them was going to continue now they were no longer in a campsite, having to make their own entertainment. The last few days had been extremely educational, exciting, and slightly tiring.  
  
His thoughts about whether he’d ever get to find out how easily Mikkel could lift him were cut short by Sigrun calling a food and water break. As they lunched, a van approached, and to everyone’s surprise pulled over by the side of the road.  
  
“Hoi!” Sigrun jumped up as the driver approached. “Oh, you have space in there?”  
  
_“Deutsch?”_ The man who’d jumped out of the driver’s seat, fairly old and dressed in working clothes, was approaching them with what seemed like concern.  
  
_“Ein bisschen?”_ Mikkel stood to meet the man and proceeded to have a conversation in halting German, accompanying his phrases with wide gestures, mostly towards the tire and in the direction they’d been walking. Their chat concluded with Mikkel profusely thanking their apparent saviour, then turning to face Reynir and Sigrun with a “Two of us are going to have to sit in the back with the tools, but he’ll take us the next few kilometers. You were right, Reynir, there is an auto shop in the next village, and it’s open for the next couple of hours.”  
  
Sitting with Sigrun in the back, Reynir saw Mikkel’s head turn as he read a sign, then turn further to announce to the people behind him “We just crossed the border into Austria”.  
  
“Are the mountains still good?” Reynir called back to him.  
  
“They are the exact same mountains, even if they belong to Austria, you know. Also, we are currently in an extremely long tunnel.” Mikkel barely sounded exasperated by yet another mountains question, and Reynir felt like that was a small victory.  
  
“He says he’ll take us back when we’re done here”, Mikkel informed them when they finally reached the auto repair shop. “Doesn’t want to see us trying to walk through the tunnel that goes under there.”  
  
“Oh, that’s so nice!” Reynir turned to the man, who seemed quite content contemplating the little parking lot while he waited, and called out to him. “Uh, _dankeschön?_ ”  
  
The little “ha!” and thumbs up he got in return for his badly-accented attempt seemed about right. To everybody’s great relief, the auto shop workers seemed sure they had a tire like the one Mikkel was showing them. While they waited for someone to finish searching, one mechanic overheard Mikkel and Reynir’s English conversation and started to join in, beginning with asking various small-talk questions about Mikkel’s “wife”. Reynir did not have time to correct him before Mikkel leaned companionably against Sigrun and confidently proclaimed that they’d met during the sinking of a cruise ship.  
  
“Really?” The young mechanic’s jaw dropped.  
  
“Oh, yes, it was terrible. The icy sea, the flaming ship. But at least I got my beautiful wife out of it.” Mikkel’s tone seemed to Reynir to be very obviously dancing between deadpan and breaking into laughter, but perhaps that was only due to being used to his humour by now. When Sigrun joined in, this Austrian man seemed to eat it up.  
  
“I really thought I was going to die in that cold water, but thank God for this beast of a man! The most powerful swimmer I’ve seen in my life, saving me from the jaws of death!” She was clearly having a lot of fun hamming it up, leaning on Mikkel and putting on an airy voice Reynir had never heard her use before, so Reynir shut up and waited for the conclusion of this strange act.  
  
“Of course, nothing compares to the disaster of our honeymoon.” Mikkel began with such a flourish that Reynir was sure his audience would catch on soon. “Having to fight the wolves that besieged our cabin, armed with only an axe…”  
  
When the people in the back finally found their tire, Reynir was a little disappointed to not get to hear any more of Mikkel and Sigrun’s ridiculous inventions. The way they riffed off each other, corroborating each other’s story in more and more detail, spoke of either immense natural talent or long practise. Once they were in the parking lot, Reynir turned to Mikkel. “So the ‘my beautiful wife’ act…”  
  
“Oh, yeah.” Mikkel snickered to himself, and Reynir again felt keenly aware of his bull-like shoulders as they shook with his mirth. “So, Sigrun and I first got mistaken for a straight couple about ten years ago, and honestly I think it’s funnier every time - ”  
  
“I basically just try to see how much else they’ll believe, if they’ll believe that.” Sigrun was carrying the new tire and also snorting at the way they’d strung the guy along. Gesturing up and down her body, she continued with “Like, be honest, am I doing something wrong? Or are there people who are just, you know, _that_ straight?” She laughed again and slung the tire in the back of the van, shooting another thanks at the helpful driver.  
  
Reynir had never been asked a question like that before. “Um, I think it’s their problem?”  
  
“It’s definitely them. Look at you.” Mikkel poked Sigrun in the back as he passed, making her squawk and jokingly move as if to smack him back. “Hey, tell him about the time we entered that ticket thing for couples, and _actually won_ , and the room they gave us for the Disney World trip had fucking _His and Hers_ shit on _everything_ …”  
  
Sigrun laughed again. “ _Ha!_ Do you still have the picture we took of you posing in the pink bathrobe?”  
  
“Of course.”  
  
Mikkel and Sigrun continued to illustrate their long and illustrious history of passing themselves off as a straight couple, hooting with laughter at the amount of absolute nonsense they’d gotten away with telling people over the last decade. The old Austrian man who had saved their day seemed quite entertained by the banterous air in his van, and when he finally dropped them off back at their car, waved goodbye with what sounded like some cheerful well-wishes.  
  
“Oh, good, I think it will fit.” Mikkel had immediately brought their new tire over to the hole left by the old one and tried to see how it sat. “I always worry they’ve given you slightly the wrong one when this kind of thing happens.”  
  
Reynir once again jumped in to assist, but Sigrun vetoed it. “No offence, Britney, but this is _my_ car.” She fussed over the wheel for about twenty minutes, tightening the bolts a mere fraction at a time as she went through the sequence again and again, and when Reynir and Mikkel were allowed to approach again it did indeed all seem as it should be.  
  
“Should we try to get over the border again tonight?” Sigrun was contemplating the lengthening shadows, peering to the west with her hand shading her eyes.  
  
“Might as well. We need more food, too.” Mikkel moved to take the driver’s seat again.  
  
“Right! Good work, team!” Sigrun leapt back into the passenger seat, gesturing at Reynir to follow.  
  
_Good work, team._ As cheesy as it was, Reynir felt a slight glow of happiness at being included in Sigrun’s statement there. The feeling of being treated as an actual participant - in solving problems, and in having Mikkel and Sigrun’s long inside jokes shared with him, being treated as someone they knew would find it funny - was new and very good.  
  
Reynir attempted to carry that good mood into sneakily starting something with Mikkel, once they had crossed the Austrian border and set up camp for the night. Mikkel’s tone in responding was oddly abrupt. “Not today, Reynir.”  
  
“Oh.” Reynir really tried his best to not act disappointed, but the immediate response of wondering what he might have done wrong was hard to hide.  
  
“Look, it’s been a weird day.”  
  
“I, um. I didn’t mean to act like there had to be like, a reason.” Reynir could feel himself turning pink as he realised how bad his _oh_ had sounded.  
  
“It _has_ been a weird day, though. That’s just a statement.”  
  
“Oh?”  
  
“Nothing terrible.”  
  
“Uh-huh.” Reynir was sure, now that Mikkel had repeated himself, that something important was up. However, he could not begin to imagine what the best method might be for getting Mikkel to say what it was. After a pause just long enough to be awkward, he offered “Well, if you want to talk about it, I um. People tell me I’m good at listening.”  
  
“That’s appreciated, Reynir. I’m going to bed.” The absolute neutrality of Mikkel’s tone felt so much like rejection. Reynir couldn’t help but wonder how to get at whatever was causing it.  


	17. Sleeping in the Cold

Reynir had always thought of Austria as being reasonably big, but the mountains receded behind him at what seemed like a great speed, and by mid-morning they had already passed the sign that said they had re-entered Germany. It seemed like forever ago that he and Mikkel had last driven through it, despite it having actually been no more than a week. After the close shave they’d had in the Slovenian mountains, Reynir felt some apprehension about opening a bag with a Norwegian label he was pretty sure meant “autobahn-only CDs”. Sigrun seemed back on form though, and Mikkel also seemed to be totally back to his normal self, so Reynir imitated his calm demeanour as Sigrun enthusiastically applied her foot to the accelerator and started to sing along to her music.   
  
“Feed _myyyy_ \- Franken _stei-ien_!” At least she could hit the notes with this one. Reynir couldn’t complain too much about anything, really, given she’d bought him yet another bag of car snacks.   
  
Around the time they started seeing the signs to turn off for Munich, Mikkel turned to her and raised his voice to get past the music. “You still set on Amsterdam?”   
  
“Amsterdam?” Reynir joined in with the yelling. He had totally missed whenever this had been suggested.   
  
“Oh, yeah, I think we were discussing this while you were asleep.” Mikkel yelled even louder to get his voice to the back, and Sigrun mercifully turned the music down a little before replying.   
  
“Yeah, I mean. I know you gotta go home and find another job, but I figured I’d stop there for a couple of days…”   
  
“Is it… on the way?” Reynir was sure his mental map said no.   
  
“Not if you’re trying to be fast, but I’m taking my time, so - ” Sigrun stopped mid-sentence to crane her neck, looking around her as she accelerated even faster past another driver. “ - what was I saying? Oh yeah, I’m in no hurry. I can cut it a bit short tho, you know, given it’s all your trip too now…”   
  
“ _Is_ it? Oh, um. I still don’t have any uh, money…” Reynir realised that stopping in a big city probably meant all the food Sigrun was buying him would cost even more, and immediately felt very guilty about this idea.   
  
“We’ll work something out.”   
  
“I’m up for Amsterdam.” Mikkel shrugged. “Guess a couple of extra days won’t make job hunting again much worse…”   
  
“ _Sweet!_ We’ll look up what we’re doing when we stop for the night, I guess.” Sigrun sounded like her planning could stop there.  
  
“At this pace, we might be already in Amsterdam by nightfall.” Mikkel’s head turned towards a road sign they were passing, then the speedometer. “We’ll be passing through that horrible Essen-Dortmund-Düsseldorf road pretzel four hours from now, if you keep this up. After that you might as well just keep going.”   
  
Reynir supposed that was the decision made, then. Neither Sigrun nor Mikkel seemed to think that they were going to have any problems with Reynir following them around during whatever they had planned. Sigrun didn’t even bother pulling over for a lunch break, just waving at Reynir to distribute some of the food they had with them, and pulled into petrol stations only briefly to refuel and let people pee. She might have been taking Mikkel’s estimate of how long it would take them to cross Germany as a challenge, because they were indeed past Essen before dinnertime. By the time the sun was even starting to get low, the buildings turning to silhouettes in the distance were clearly outlined windmills, and the horizon those windmills stood against was ruler-flat.   
  
“I had no idea all that, you know, traditional Dutch stuff was still so obvious when you drive through the country.” Reynir was glued against the window again for the first time since Austria. It was hard to tell from the motorway, but he thought they might have just passed an actual tulip field as well.   
  
“It can be.” Mikkel was taking his turn to shuffle through the CDs, finally trying to assert some control over the music, now that Sigrun’s enthusiasm was again being held back by a speed limit.   
  
“Just you wait till we get to Amsterdam! Hey, Mikkel, have you looked up where we can stay yet?”   
  
“Ah. No. One moment.” Mikkel shuffled around the floor for his phone and started to poke at it. “I’ll look for double rooms, that should fit all of us if we’re just trying to crash out.”   
  
“Are you allowed to book three people into a double room?” Reynir wondered if he’d be sleeping in the car again. Well, he couldn’t really complain if that’s where they were putting him, although his immediate reaction to Mikkel not wanting to see him overnight did contain a bit of panic.   
  
“Well, no, but it’s not like anybody pays hotel staff enough to really care. Just don’t puke on stuff or do anything that destroys the plausible deniability.” Mikkel said it like it was extremely obvious, and Reynir supposed he was indeed kind of stupid for not guessing that was going to be the _modus operandi_ here. “Okay, everyone shut up and turn the music off, I’ll call one of these numbers.”   
  
With some kind of hostel room booked and every concurrent sign declaring that they were getting closer to Amsterdam, Mikkel took over the music properly. Reynir didn’t find it quite as harsh as he would have a week ago. By the time they’d located somewhere to park, the sun was getting truly low, and the clock in a closed shop window reminded Reynir of how far they’d driven today. He’d just got used to the bizarrely dark summer nights in Spain and Slovenia, and while the sun really setting at this time of year was still unusual for him, the 9pm dusk was a little closer to normal.   
  
“You wait out here while we get the keys, alright?” Sigrun patted Reynir on the shoulder and vaguely gestured at the street corner. “Time for the husband-and-wife assumptions again! Ha!”   
  
Reynir let them go and wandered to the corner. Once they’d disappeared into the building, he looked around himself properly, and finally felt the shock of having come all thee way from the Alps’ foothills that day. Not only had the landscape totally changed, the difference in latitude and the steady approach of night had made Reynir dramatically less well dressed for the weather. Standing here in his tiny jorts with his shirt still tied up to his waist, he felt a bit exposed, all the more so for realising how very many people were around now. Aside from maybe Barcelona, this was the biggest city Reynir had ever been in, and the back-to-back multi-storey buildings were a little claustrophobic.   
  
Reynir was so entranced by staring at the crowds moving that he didn’t really notice a man approaching him. When he realised he was being spoken to, then mentally recalibrated to parse the man’s thick French accent, it still took him a moment more to work out exactly why this man was asking him about money.   
  
“ _Oh...!_ Oh, that’s um, not what I do, actually! You should probably find someone else!” Reynir held up his hands in an intensely awkward gesture of appeasement, having realised very abruptly how he looked, standing on a dusky Amsterdam street corner dressed in less clothes than almost everyone else. He backed away, going embarrassingly pink. “Sorry for the um, the misunderstanding! Have a good night!”   
  
By the time Mikkel and Sigrun reappeared, Reynir had fled back to near the hotel door and was pressed against the wall. Sigrun greeted him, waving a card in the air that was likely the hotel room key, then came up and inspected him with the kind of inquisitive squint one would normally give a poorly translated sign. “Britney! You look like a tomato! You alright?”   
  
“Huh? Oh, yeah.” Reynir crossed his arms. He was realising that while it wasn’t too bad for short periods, staying out here like this was going to leave him really cold soon. “So are we going up to the room, or…?”   
  
“Come on! You’ve been sitting on your butt all day! We came here for a reason, alright?” Sigrun poked Reynir in the chest, grinning. “It’s a Saturday night.”   
  
Reynir had totally lost track of what weekday it was, but now he added it up, that did sound about right. “Huh. So it is.”   
  
“All your important stuff is stashed up there. Your old shirt, that ticket and all.” Mikkel walked to the edge of the street and looked down it. “And I think a likely first stop would be just over... there.”   
  
The first bar was alright. Out of the cold breeze, Reynir no longer felt so half-covered, and idly people-watched rather than accepting being bought a drink. While fairly used to the sight of a crowd of people in tourist mode, this crowd of travellers was quite different from the Reykjavik one, and he thought he could even spot some Icelanders here and there taking their turn at being oblivious foreigners. Reynir remembered Bjarni telling him that one of the bizarre things about travelling was realising how many of your own countrymen were impossible to mistake as being from anywhere else. The comments he’d made about realising how weirdly similar a lot of Icelanders looked hadn’t been far off.   
  
Sigrun’s hand was on Reynir’s arm, pulling him out of his crowd-watching reverie. She shouted in his ear for good measure. “Next bar! Next bar!”   
  
Reynir followed, hanging back a little to listen to the last of a song that someone had been playing on the bar’s little stage. When it had ended, he stood on his tiptoes, searching through the crowd in the street to look for Mikkel and Sigrun’s backs. Catching sight of them, he ran after, shouting “Hey, wait up!”   
  
“Eh?” The guy who turned around, while identical in frame and colouration to Mikkel, had a very different face.   
  
“Oh! Sorry, I thought you were my friend!” Reynir turned back around and looked down the street the other way. Mikkel and Sigrun were now nowhere to be seen, and he jogged back further the way he’d come, searching with increasing concern. Surely they hadn’t gone that far. How big could one downtown area be?   
  
Apparently, it could be extremely big. Reynir wandered for a few minutes more and fast realised that he’d also lost track of the way he’d come here by, despite the fact it couldn’t have been more than a few streets from the hostel. Not that he could get into the hostel anyway, since neither Mikkel nor Sigrun had given him a key, and he didn’t even know what the room number was. His only chance was to find the two of them again, but where?   
  
The first bar he thought to look in had a door charge, and despite Reynir begging that he only wanted to check if his friends were in there, the doorman’s expression never moved a millimeter away from totally impassive denial. The bar after that contained a lot of very sweaty people already well into the sloppy-drunk stage of their night, but no sign of Mikkel and Sigrun. Reynir tried to retrace his steps, reasoning that perhaps they’d realise they’d lost him and go back to the hostel too, but found navigating such a broad cityscape surprisingly hard.   
  
He leaned against the railings of a bridge, shivering at the ever-colder breeze coming off the canal below and staring into the crowd again. The total strangeness of the faces was intensely intimidating. If you got lost in Reykjavik, you could very plausibly hope to find someone on the street who at least knew one of your cousins. Here, Reynir realised, getting lost was terrifyingly total.   
  
“Hey man, you okay?” A man was peering at Reynir, American-sounding, black with an arty suede jacket and a big hat holding back a pile of neat dreadlocks. “You need something?”   
  
“I think I’m lost. Um, I need to find my friends. I don’t know where my hostel is.”   
  
“Huh. Have you uh, taken something?” The man was peering closer, tentatively.   
  
“I’m like, so sober.” Reynir’s voice was full of regret for that fact and every other he’d just listed.   
  
“...Huh.” The man squinted at him again. “So, no idea at all where someone could take you?”   
  
Reynir shook his head, and realised that actually the last thing he wanted was to send yet another nice person on a wild goose chase with his uselessness. Putting on a brighter tone, he straightened up. “It’s fine, uh, I’ll work it out. Thanks for the concern, really.” His smile was likely unconvincing, but at least he managed one. “Have a good evening!”   
  
Once he’d gotten out of the helpful man’s line of sight, Reynir slumped against the nearest wall again. He was so, so lost, and had no idea what to do about it. Across the road, a lit-up sign gave a stern warning to tourists not to buy drugs on the street, flashing statistics about the year’s count of deaths from cut heroin. The language changed, and Reynir read what he assumed was the same announcement again in French, then German. Wrapping his hands around his cold shoulders, he shivered again, and wondered where on earth he was going to spend the night.


	18. I'm Alright

“You alright babes?”

Reynir lifted his head from his folded arms and looked up from the sticky table where he had been resting. The woman speaking to him was wearing bunny ears over her high ponytail, huge fake eyelashes, and a tiny black pencil dress. She was wavering slightly, drink in hand, and starting to lean down to share Reynir's table with an expression of deep concern.  
  
“Are - you - all - right - _babes_?” she asked again, louder and slower. “D'you speak Engl-”  
  
“Yeah. Sorry. I'm alright I guess.” Reynir struggled to find the energy to raise his voice enough.  
  
“Well you don't bloody look it!” The woman shook Reynir's shoulder, nearly colliding with him as she threw her weight into it. “Where are your mates?”  
  
“My friends? I lost them about two hours ago.”  
  
“Oh no!” The woman's eyes were showing deep, earnest shock, and she turned to her right. “Emily! Char! His mates all ditched him, look.”  
  
Sitting up properly, Reynir saw that this phrase had summoned a gaggle of at least eight other women who were all dressed in a near-identical manner to the first, aside from one decorated with a bright pink sash that read BRIDE TO BE. The last members of the swarm picked their way off the dancefloor as they spotted their friends converging, then they all surrounded Reynir like chickens investigating a new piece of wood in their pen.  
  
“Wossyorname?” A woman that might have been “Emily” or “Char” poked Reynir.  
  
“Excuse me?”  
  
“What's - your - name?"  
  
“Reynir”  
  
The first woman made a loud noise of interest. “Oo, where's that from?”  
  
“I'm Icelandic?” Reynir didn't quite know what to do about this.  
  
“Ooo, Iceland! I love ABBA!” piped up a third one.  
  
“That's well cool. What are you doing here?” asked a fourth.  
  
“Um, it's a bit of a long story actually. What are you all doing here?” Reynir tried to smile at them. They at least seemed nice.  
  
Several joined in at once to answer that one. “Siobhan's getting married!”  
  
“Oh, congratulations, Siobhan!” said Reynir, turning to the one in the sash and extending his hand to shake hers. For some reason, this made the entire group of them erupt with noise.  
  
“Oh no, bless him! Let's keep him.” the first woman announced.  
  
“Keep me?”  
  
Reynir lost track of exactly how he was ushered off his table and towards the bar, and then lost track of even more when one member of this party announced that the cure for Reynir's tiredness was “Jägerbombs!”, which did indeed seem to make it much easier to dance with his eight or nine semi-anonymous new friends.  
  
“Tell us what you're doing here!” said Siobhan, on the way to a different club.  
  
“Oh, well, like I said it's a long story. I'm basically really lost. I meant to go to Berlin.” said Reynir, as if this explained anything.  
  
“Why'd you want to go to Poland?” said the ABBA fan from earlier.  
  
“I did end up in Poland actually, but then I got picked up by a guy, and um, I've just been with him since, I was meant to be partying with him here but now he's gone…”  
  
“You make it sound like your boyfriend left you!” yelled one from behind him.  
  
“No offence _is_ he your boyfriend? Have you followed a guy all this way?”  
  
“Um.” Reynir hadn't expected that line of questioning at all. “I dunno?”  
  
“Oh _noooo_.” said the woman who'd picked Reynir off the table. “Sounds like trouble!”  
  
Luckily they entered another nightclub after that, in which conversation was impossible. It was another one's jägerbomb round, and Reynir was again included. Reynir was feeling increasingly glad he'd been picked up off that table. All the problems of not having a place to sleep remained, but this was a far better way of waiting till morning than just being moved on from various sticky tables. He only wondered if he could actually keep it up till then.  
  
That concern was answered when the first woman ushered him towards the club’s squeaky-plastic little couch and pressed a little twist of paper into his palm. “We're all having some! Go on!”  
  
“Hm?” Reynir tried to unroll the bit of paper, only to have the woman stop his fingers. “No, it's better if you swallow it whole!”  
  
Reynir did so, then his brain caught up with what his hand had just done. “Oh, was that - ” He thought of the signs he’d seen earlier. This felt concerning, but some of Mikkel and Sigrun’s attitudes must really have been rubbing off on him, because Reynir decided that continuing with his evening was the only real course of action. If he was going to deal with any problems that came up, it only made sense to start planning when he knew what they actually turned out to be.  
  
“If it's been an hour and you're not feeling it I'll give you another one! Ooh look, everyone's moving! Come on!”  
  
Realising quickly that he did indeed have enough energy to dance more, possibly forever, was the best feeling ever. The cold air as they moved from club to club was as sweet as water after running, and soothed the faint nausea Reynir had felt as the energy bubbled up within him. The pack that had adopted Reynir was so impossibly sweet-natured, and he had never realised how physically good dancing felt before. That song he'd heard on the radio through Germany, France and Spain was being played in here, a longer version that Reynir now reacted to very enthusiastically.  
  
The group had congregated in the smoking area and Reynir stood with them, enjoying the rough texture of the wall on his back and gulping down a cup of water. He could barely follow the conversation that was going on between them, confused by the mix of strong British accents and constant references to people he didn’t know. The ABBA fan was petting his braid, cooing about being jealous of that bright red being natural. Reynir listened as she vacillated between playing with his hair and telling him in great detail about her text history with a recent ex.  
  
“It’s so worrying though! What were you saying about that guy you started living with?” Her next change of topic was very abrupt, and she gripped Reynir’s arm with her eyes so wide he could see the whole width of her pupils glittering.  
  
“I don’t - well.” Reynir had not previously realised he had this many events and emotional nuances to explain, but once he started talking about it, his new friend’s soft gasps and arm-gripping reactions had him sharing an awful lot. It was so nice, the way she seemed to think Mikkel’s hard-to-read moods were so important, even if she seemed a bit fixated on asking exactly how they’d been having sex. At least Reynir didn’t seem very capable of embarrassment at the moment. When he had finished talking about how closed-off Mikkel felt, she nodded very knowledgeably.  
  
“He has a _sadness_. I’m sure that’s it.”  
  
“Do you think?” Reynir had indeed wondered about that, or something like what she probably meant.   
  
“Maybe you’re meant to, like, save him. Since he’s been so nice to you and all. Like, he picks you up off the road, and then you make _him_ open up.” She looked wistful and took another fistful of Reynir’s hair in her hand. “Are you and him like, exclusive?”  
  
“Um.”  
  
“You should ask him if he wants to be!”  
  
“Hm.” Reynir felt that despite the level of detail in her earlier questioning, there was still a gap between exactly what he’d said and what she’d heard. Then again, her hands were really soft, and she was very nice. Maybe there was something to what she said. “He has a lot of stories. It’s kind of mysterious.”  
  
“You’re a really good listener, Reindeer. I bet he needs you really.” She took off her bunny ears and put them on his head, carefully arranging his flyaway hairs around the headband of it. “I’m getting cold! Let’s go dance more!”  
  
The rest of them had long since migrated back inside, and told Reynir that they intended to stay there, as half the other places had already closed. The extended _hey, I just met you, and this is crazy_ came on for maybe the third time, and various members of the group helped push Reynir into further dancing, collectively whooping when a man still wearing his beanie in the club started to kiss him. The man constantly interrupted the groping to re-arrange the beanie, and might have still had a bag of tobacco against his gum, but the feeling of being touched was so warm and welcome. Reynir almost lost his group again when the club kicked everyone out, but was dragged back towards it.  
  
They fed him bits of their chips, huddled around him against the night wind, and didn’t stop him following them as they started walking to find a taxi. Despite the kindness, as Reynir started to feel a bit more sober, he also began to feel decidedly less happy. He was so intent on quietly staring at his own feet that he almost failed to notice when their path led them down a familiar street.  
  
“Oh! That’s my hostel!”  
  
The whole group stopped. Reynir stared at the door, realising his problem still was not solved. “I don’t have a key.” Realising that he was again risking tying up everyone’s evening, he turned to them. “I’ll find a way to get in. Thank you so much for picking me up.”  
  
Reynir had never had such an extended goodbye with anyone, individual or group. After being very extensively hugged and kissed on the cheek, he watched the entire party wobble off down the down the road, half of them carrying their shoes rather than even trying to walk on them. Transfixed by the sight of one nearly tottering off the kerb, he almost missed it when some other nightclub-goers approached behind him, rummaging in their pockets and producing one of the keycards Sigrun had been waving earlier.  
  
Reynir took his chance to follow them in through the door. None of them seemed to care, and they all disappeared upstairs with little more than a nod to him. Reynir stood in the dark lobby, wondering where to go to next, the warmth indoors making his tiredness even more noticable.  
  
Poking his way around, he entered some kind of communal kitchen area, and was struck by relief as he noticed a familiar face illuminated by a little lamp set into the wall.  
  
“Mikkel!” Reynir kept his voice to a stage-whisper.  
  
Mikkel put his phone down and looked up, speaking barely above a stage-whisper himself. “Jesus! There you fucking are! Where were you?”  
  
“I think I got adopted by a hen party. They were nice.”  
  
Mikkel gently applied his palm to his face. “And here I was worried.”  
  
“Sorry!” Reynir’s stage-whisper verged into a squeak. “Um, why are you down here? It’s, um - what time _is_ it?”  
  
“About five AM, and I’m down here because _somebody_ needed our hotel room all to herself for a while.” Mikkel rolled his eyes. “Did you happen to see a blond woman leaving on your way in?”  
  
“Er, no, sorry.”  
  
Mikkel sighed. He looked exhausted, and Reynir felt a mix of guilt and weird happiness knowing that his absence had been worrying to Mikkel. The memory of having felt very soft at any person touching him earlier surfaced, and Reynir picked his way around the table to join Mikkel, sitting in his lap rather than on a chair. Mikkel just responded by placing an arm around him. The heavy way it flopped around his shoulders, and the smell of Mikkel’s breath, told Reynir he was not alone in still being a bit drunk.  
  
“You can handle yourself better than I thought.” Mikkel pressed his face into Reynir’s hair, making Reynir’s weird wide-awake exhaustion instantly quieter in his head. “It’s good, you’re a nice one.”  
  
Reynir wondered if Mikkel’s life had been unusually short of “nice ones”. Maybe that was the reason behind him being so inscrutable sometimes. Reynir still had no real idea what the deal was here, but letting Mikkel start falling asleep in his hair felt like what he should be doing. Mikkel found Reynir’s freezing-cold arms and instinctively hugged them closer to himself, a gesture that in Reynir’s half-fried state felt heart-meltingly sweet. He must have himself dozed at some point, because it felt very sudden when the main light turned on and an early-shift employee appeared with a trolley full of breakfast items.  
  
“You two have a room here?” she asked mid-yawn.  
  
“Uh, yeah.” Mikkel showed her a keycard with a vague wave of his hand.  
  
“Cool, whatever.” She pointed at the table they were half-slumped against. “I need that.”  
  
Finally going up the stairs and finding their room, they were greeted by the sight of Sigrun sprawled across the bed, naked and soundly asleep. Mikkel pulled at the blanket under her, rolling her closer to the wall, then wedged himself into the bed next to her. Reynir dropped his bunny ears on the floor and curled up against Mikkel, sighed happily as the arm went around him again, and finally passed out properly.


	19. James Bondage

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry for the huge gap in updates. My computer still won't turn on at all, which on top of some chaotic mental health issues and starting a new job has made writing and posting stuff a bit difficult. Hopefully posting all 4 final chapters at once helps make up for it!
> 
> Oh, also, this chapter has boning in it. Standard heads up.

Reynir examined the crushed bits of plastic he’d found in his pocket. It appeared to be the remains of a penis-shaped drinking straw, which he had no memory of being given to him. Wringing out his original t-shirt over the sink, he hung it over the cubicle door and hoped it’d dry enough here to wear tomorrow. There was nowhere to hang stuff up in their room, and Mikkel’s band singlet had gotten kind of disgusting. Standing up for long enough to shower was slightly nauseating, but when he was done, he felt much more like a human being than he had before. Still not entirely there, but it was something.   
  
He was sure he wasn’t exactly hungover, but the desire to crawl under a blanket and stay there for a long time was very strong. When he got back to their room and told Mikkel this, he was asked for a recap of the previous night. Reynir described the part with the drugs, and Mikkel just snorted to himself. “Yeah, that’ll do it. Give it a few hours, your brain probably just needs to catch up on making serotonin. Assuming it was actually MD, take a handful of 5-HTP as well next time.” His instructions was so specific that Reynir assumed Mikkel probably knew what he was talking about, so he let himself be dragged out of the hostel to go see Amsterdam. In the afternoon light, it was much friendlier. Reynir giggled at the sight of someone trying to fix yet another bike to a fence that was already so packed it looked as if the bikes had been growing on it, sticking out at odd angles like ice crystals on a branch.   
  
“Pippi’s cheering up!” Sigrun punched Reynir in the arm, showing no sign of a hangover herself.   
  
“Hmm.” Reynir still felt a bit quiet and worried, but she was right, he must be getting there.   
  
“So are we still going to that dildo museum?” Sigrun asked.   
  
Mikkel shrugged. “I don’t really mind. Reynir?”   
  
“Um, I mean, there’s an actual penis museum in Reykjavik, which I’ve already been to, so I dunno what the point is with a museum of fake ones” said Reynir, a hint of despondency creeping into his voice. Mikkel actually laughed out loud at Reynir’s brief spot of melodrama. Reynir just felt like a party pooper. He could just feel how loud Sigrun was going to laugh at that museum’s contents, and was absolutely not ready for it.   
  
“Damn. Iceland has us all beat.” Sigrun looked genuinely impressed, and Reynir decided not to let her down by telling her that particular Reykjavik tourist trap was basically a small room with some trinkets and one man-sized pickled whale penis in it. “I still kinda want to go. Just for the pictures…”   
  
The museum was kind of interesting. Some of it was actually historical stuff Reynir had never really thought about, so he could mostly read the exhibits and block out Sigrun and Mikkel taking pictures of themselves with the man-sized fiberglass penises. When they all finally emerged into the sunlight, Reynir realised he did feel properly better.   
  
Sigrun had left to go and do “something”, which Reynir suspected was more of what she’d been up to last night, and left Mikkel and Reynir together. The expression on Mikkel’s face as he thought about the rest of their day was starting to look smug enough to be a plan forming. “You know, now that you’ve perked up, and Sigrun’s gone… Want to come shopping?”   
  
“Oh, sure.” Reynir spent the entire walk down the road assuming Mikkel was going to be buying their group more packs of boil-in-the-bag rice. Only when he noticed the shop’s tinted windows did he realise what sort of thing they might be shopping for. _“Oh!”_   
  
“Oh?” Mikkel hesitated very visibly.   
  
“I thought we were buying snacks!”   
  
“...Ah.”   
  
“This is good too!”   
  
Reynir didn’t try to make up for his obliviousness in words, taking Mikkel by the hand and dragging him into the shop. Once they were inside and Reynir turned back, Mikkel was clearly letting a little smile show through the dim lighting. Reynir realised he still had no idea what exactly they’d come in here for. He was still holding Mikkel’s big hand. Well, whatever Mikkel had in mind, Reynir decided he wanted to try it.   
  
Still, when Mikkel started eyeing up the displays and taking collars off racks to hold against Reynir’s neck, the inevitable blush returned.   
  
It got even worse when a shop assistant came over and exclaimed that one of the collars would look “adorable” on him, her tone no different the one Reynir would expect to hear if he’d been following his sister dress-shopping. Mikkel agreeing, his voice just as light and casual, was utterly mortifying. Reynir could have done with more of it, though. Having to stand there and hear it was much more enjoyable than it had any right to be.   
  
“And do you think so?” Mikkel pointed at the reflective surface on the side of one cabinet. “It fits alright?”   
  
“Mm-hmm.” Reynir tried it on and felt Mikkel’s finger slide between the collar and his skin, pulling lightly to test it. “Oh! Oh, I... like that.” He hoped the poor sales assistant assumed he meant he liked how the collar looked. She seemed totally unperturbed by the interaction in front of her, ringing it up with a “Looks cute! Have fun!” and waving a cheery goodbye as they left.   
  
“Now, I have some normal shopping to do. You can go back to the room, though, if you feel like making sure you’re ready to have something in your ass.” Mikkel was just standing on the pavement outside the shop, holding the leash the collar came with and saying this as if he was asking what Reynir wanted for dinner. Nobody passing even bothered to listen to him.   
  
Reynir took a deep breath. “...Can you remind me what the way back is?”   
  
Mikkel grinned, the fullest smile Reynir had seen on him yet, and reached around to stuff the collar and lead into Reynir’s back pocket. The little squeeze as he poked the leash’s handle into Reynir’s back pocket made them both grin. After giving Reynir the directions and room key, Mikkel turned to wander off on his own errands, then paused. “Oh, there’s lube in my bag.” With that, he was gone, and Reynir took another deep breath. The few streets’ walk back to the hostel gave him plenty of time to anticipate exactly what was going to happen, and by the time he got up to their room, he was really hoping Mikkel would hurry up. Staring at the collar in his hand, he pondered what exactly he himself should do first.   
  
It took him a moment to find the lube among all Mikkel’s other “in case” items, but at least it wasn’t as if he had never put a finger up his butt before. Oh, ew. A visit to the bathroom made a second attempt a lot better. Reynir started to get a little anxious about the off-chance of Sigrun getting back first, but nowhere near anxious enough to actually make him stop. Putting the collar on himself didn’t feel as good as when Mikkel did it, but once it was on he didn’t want to take it off, and he wiggled out of his clothes with another little stomach-lurch of anticipation. He guessed it made sense to just go ahead and start fingering himself.   
  
Reynir was in an extremely compromising position - naked, wearing a collar, and half hard with two fingers in himself - when the doorknob turned. Jerking with surprise, Reynir sat up, convinced for half a second he’d actually made Sigrun walk in on this.   
  
Mikkel shut the door behind him, eyes fixed on Reynir and widening slightly. “Oh, well then. Someone’s keen.”   
  
Reynir nodded, biting his lip. Mikkel didn’t waste any time once he’d seen the state Reynir was in, dropping his shopping right on the floor and approaching him.   
  
“ _Well_. As a first thing, I think you shouldn’t be on the bed yet.” Mikkel gestured to a spot on the floor. Pulling his fingers out of himself, Reynir scrambled down there, wondering what was coming. Mikkel leant down to pick the end of the leash off the floor, sat on the bed, and gently pulled to bring Reynir between his legs. Taking Reynir’s chin in his leash-holding hand, he held it steady, and once again slipped two fingers into Reynir’s collar. “You _do_ look good in that collar.”   
  
Reynir gulped, suddenly at a total loss for words. His cock standing at attention and his face flushing again, he stammered. “Thank, thank you?”   
  
Of course Mikkel smirked at the effect he’d had. He took Reynir’s leash in his hand and leaned back, pulling Reynir up onto his knees, then began to fondle his naked body as if inspecting it. The moment Mikkel’s thumb rolled over his nipple, Reynir gave up trying not to moan. Mikkel just tugged on the leash again, making Reynir kneel up straighter, and Reynir squirmed as his neck and hips were prodded in ways that had no right to feel that good. His breath got shorter, and his cock was throbbing, but Mikkel firmly batted Reynir’s hands back into place. “Not yet.”   
  
Reynir whimpered. Mikkel took off his shirt, and from where Reynir was kneeling, the sight of him only made it harder not to beg him to get on with it. At Reynir’s half-voiced “Please…”, Mikkel paused.   
  
“Please what?”   
  
Reynir ran his hand down Mikkel’s body, through the hair on his chest and belly, till his hand rested on top of Mikkel’s jeans zipper. He could feel the shape of his cock in there, firm and so distinctly blood-warm, and felt his own belly start to swirl with nerves again as he palmed the length and girth of it. “This…”   
  
“Ask properly.” Mikkel tugged the leash again, not roughly or fast, but easily firmly enough that Reynir had no choice but to look him in the eye when he spoke.     
  
Reynir gasped. The collar pressing on his neck, and the angle he was being held at, made it hard to breathe.   
  
“Please let me suck your cock.”   
  
Mikkel didn’t make him beg too much. Reynir was allowed some freedom as he unzipped Mikkel’s pants and pulled his cock out, then felt fingers in the back of his collar again as his head was directed down. He choked, first from the pressure on the outside of his neck, then from the pressure on this inside of his throat. He never knew choking made him this hard, and Mikkel used Reynir’s hair and collar to move him up and down just enough to keep him struggling to breathe.   
  
Mikkel pulled Reynir up for a moment, letting him gasp a few times before speaking in a low voice. “There are condoms in the same place as the lube.”   
  
Reynir wiped his watering eyes. “I’ll … you need to let me go over there.”   
  
Mikkel was clearly enjoying the view as Reynir crawled back, leash trailing as he rummaged in the bag, then crawled back with a condom in his hands like an offering. Reynir felt clumsy putting it on him. It was girthier than he was used to, and strained against the rubber in a way that only made it look more so.   
  
“Very good.” Taking Reynir’s face in his hands again, Mikkel shifted back a little on the bed. “Up here.”   
  
Reynir climbed up and let Mikkel turn him around, soft stomach and broad chest to his back. He could feel the coarseness of hair against his shoulderblades, and leaned back as Mikkel tongued his neck. Mikkel didn’t let him thrust into it when he slid a hand over Reynir’s cock, holding him still by the collar as he fondled his balls, and Reynir just shivered when a finger entered him again. “Ah, the lube is…”   
  
“Here, I know.” Mikkel squeezed more of it on. His fingers were so much fatter than Reynir’s. “Relax…”   
  
Reynir tried to, and found out that he could. Surely, Mikkel couldn't make him wait any longer. The cock jutting into his back felt just as hard as he himself was, and when Mikkel finally asked him if he was ready, Reynir’s affirmative gasping required no double-checking.   
  
He really didn’t expect this to be as good as it was. The first time he’d had sex at all had been kind of underwhelming, and Reynir had been so sure that was just the way it went. This, though, was totally different. Mikkel held Reynir’s hips down when he had finally taken all of it, keeping him in place, and murmured to Reynir to get used to it first.   
  
“No, don’t wait.” Reynir squirmed against the hands holding him down, and Mikkel let him slide upwards, then down again. Riding Mikkel's cock made him feel outside himself. When Mikkel bit his earlobe, putting broad hands on Reynir’s hips and collar again, Reynir just keened.   
  
He knew he couldn’t last long like this. The stretch and the fondling and the half-choking feeling of his collar were all too much together. When Mikkel started to stroke his cock, there was no hope for him at all. It only took a few minutes before he shot cum all over Mikkel’s fingers, gagging and gasping as his body finally let out all the anticipation of the past two hours. Mikkel just brought his cum-covered fingers up to Reynir’s lips, and Reynir licked them clean.   
  
Reynir didn’t ask or want Mikkel to stop, but he was still glad it didn’t last much longer. Being fucked some more when he already felt like he’d been dragged through a bush was near overwhelming. He felt every jerk and pulse of it when Mikkel finally emptied his balls, and a sense of accomplishment he couldn't put his finger on. Probably because he'd gone a bit beyond fingers, by now.  
  
"I feel like I wanna pass out." Reynir knew he must sound pretty incoherent.  
  
Mikkel let him, though, gently pulling Reynir into his arms and running his hands up and down him as if checking everything still worked. It was so soothing that Reynir could have fallen asleep while still wearing his collar, and he did.   



	20. Too Many Hoops

The last day in Amsterdam had gone by in a blur, and now the journey through Germany started to feel like a horrible countdown. Reynir was realising that whatever it was that he and Mikkel had, he didn’t want to leave it behind, but that was what the end of the road to Denmark signified now. 

“Laaa _aaai_ …” Sigrun was listening to some seemingly neverending song which included a lot of chanting in Finnish, warlike guitar noises and enthusiastic nonsense yelling. “La-la- _laaai_ , la-la- _laaai_ , lai-ah- _eiiii_ …”   
  
“Eyes on the road...” Mikkel’s reprimand, despite being about not killing them all, had the exact air of an old dog that had all but stopped caring about toddlers pulling its ears.   
  
“A- _lei_ , a- _lei_ , a- _lei_ , a- _lei_ , ala _lai_ , ala _lai_ , lala lai lai _hei!_ ” Sigrun finished her clause of weird yodeling and swerved to overtake someone else. “I _am_ watching the road!”

Reynir was quiet in the back. He had a lot to think about, and this was the first moment he’d had in days to do that thinking in.

He was pretty sure that drunk girl had been right about Mikkel, in some way. As the two of them had become closer, Reynir had started to feel ever more strongly that there was something about Mikkel that just cried out for affection. Reynir knew he didn’t come off as the wisest person sometimes, but he wasn’t totally oblivious, and he was incapable of forgetting someone who might be hurting. Mikkel had made him feel things that he hadn’t known he was capable of, and after all that had been done for him, Reynir felt an overpowering need to reciprocate. But if the road had seemed like an endless stretch ahead of him before, it felt now like the few centimeters left in a mostly-occupied driveway. The Netherlands had disappeared behind them almost before he could notice it, and now Germany was in the process of doing so as well.  
  
“Reynir! You asleep?” Sigrun asked in a voice that would have made the answer into “no”, even if it hadn’t been already.   
  
“Nope!” Reynir sat up. “Do you need another CD?”   
  
“Yep, and don’t take it from the autobahn playlist this time, Denmark has a speed limit…”   
  
Sinking back into the seat and shuffling around for a CD, Reynir felt another stab of worry in his guts. Being less than 40 minutes from Denmark already just felt bad, and now all of this free time to think about stuff felt bad too.   
  
“Reynir. Is Google right about it being four days until your boat goes again?” Mikkel had been prodding his phone for some time, and leaned back to address Reynir with it held up to show a ferry schedule.   
  
“Oh! Yes, it is!” Reynir made a show of peering at it, although there was no real reason to. “I, um… I know at least three of my cousins moved to Copenhagen, and that was the last time I checked, so it could be more now…”   
  
Mikkel waited for Reynir to finish his half-formed thought about the flight of young Icelanders abroad, then handed his phone over with a simple “Well, try to get in contact, and I suppose if you can’t, I’ll just be hanging around looking for another job, so…”   
  
Reynir wasn’t sure if Mikkel was trying to get him to accept the invite or not. He sent off a couple of emails for those cousins he was in contact with, asked his mum for the numbers of those he wasn’t, and hoped just a little bit that all of them would be too busy to put him up. Mikkel let him check again as they neared Copenhagen, though, and sure enough a cousin had replied to him saying that he had a Reynir-length sofa in his flat. Sigrun asking for said cousin’s street address made their imminent parting of ways a little too real. Their rambling route through the suburbs finding it, aided by Mikkel’s approximate memory of where that area was, felt both endless and far too short.   
  
“Oh no, Britney, are you gonna miss me?” Sigrun leaned out her window, flashing a cheesy grin. “Don’t worry, I’ll definitely be calling on the favour if I’m ever in Iceland. You owe me dinner, yeah?”   
  
“Oh! Absolutely at least dinner! Thank you so much for everything!” Reynir leaned down to the window. He shivered as an even colder breeze than Amsterdam’s scurried through the cutoff fraying on his jorts - night had fallen already, and he was glad that at least his original shirt had returned to his back - and addressed Mikkel. “Um, so if I’m going to be here for four more days, do you want to, um…”   
  
“Oh, sure, come over before you leave. Here’s my number, I assume your cousin has a phone.” Mikkel handed it over in neat, bold printing, and Reynir clasped it tightly. The two of them driving off, leaving Reynir standing on the kerb with only a ferry ticket and number in his hand, felt close to surreal after all that had happened. With them gone, Reynir was just himself again, and cold as well.   
  
“Hoi, Reynir! Er, nice jorts?”   
  
Reynir turned. So, they had found the right building for his cousin, if not the right staircase. A short way down the road, Hjalti was standing there, the family resemblance clear enough to make him obvious even though they hadn’t met in years. “Oh! Yeah, I was in the south.”   
  
“What on earth happened to you?” Hjalti approached Reynir, sizing him up. He himself was dressed far more sensibly for a grey Danish summer night, and it made Reynir’s getup seem just ridiculous enough to feel embarrassing.   
  
“Can I tell the story once I’m inside?”   
  
At least entertaining Hjalti with the story of the last few weeks felt like decent payment for using his couch. He seemed to find every aspect of it incredibly funny, hooting with laughter and slapping his thigh at least once for every few minutes of storytelling. “Reynir, this is exactly what would happen to you. I’m sorry, but it’s true.”   
  
“Mm.” Reynir had left out an awful lot of the stuff that had felt most important to him. He wondered if Hjalti, who had last met Reynir when he was twelve, would also think the dirty weekend in Amsterdam was exactly in character. “Oh, by the way, I don’t have a phone anymore. Can I use yours while I’m here?”   
  
“Sure!”   
  
Reynir waited until Hjalti had gone to work in the morning to use the phone. The barely-used landline still clinging to one wall got what was likely its first use in months, and Reynir sat against the wall, half wondering if the number he’d been given would turn out to be a prank. Surely not, after all that had happened between them. When Mikkel picked up, Reynir was so giddy with relief he totally forgot to speak for a moment.   
  
“Um, yeah! I mean if you’re not busy!” Reynir felt like a young teen again, curling the landline cord around his finger and sliding down the wall. “Sure, I can wait till the afternoon…”   
  
Reynir really tried to take Hjalti up on his offer of being able to borrow some trousers, but he totally failed to find a belt among the things in the flat. He would have to wait till he got back to Iceland to be free of his jorts, and the drizzly weather outside made him feel like incoming mum lecture for wrecking his jeans was totally deserved. Luckily, it turned out that Mikkel’s offer of “coming over for a bit” had been exactly what it sounded like, and none of the things they did required clothes of any kind.   
  
“You know, we could go to a cafe or something next time instead. We can’t all be in our 20s and do that _every_ day.” Mikkel seemed greatly entertained by Reynir’s look of puzzlement. “I should get things done tomorrow, but you’ve got one more day before you go back, yes?”   
  
“Mm-hmm.”   
  
“See you the day after tomorrow, then. If you’re not out having fun with someone else.”   
  
Reynir was flattered, but a little puzzled by the idea that he might so quickly find someone else to spend time with. It wasn't as if he really knew anyone here, or was especially good at that sort of thing. His cousin had the day off the next day, too, and had promised to show him everything worth seeing in Copenhagen. With the recent memory of Amsterdam in his mind, it turned out to be a little underwhelming. The two of them set off exactly as promised, and by the time two hours of drizzle had fallen on him, Reynir’s enthusiasm had drained away so totally he felt like his own limply damp t-shirt.

“ _That's_ the famous statue?” Reynir peered across the water at it.

“They do say right in the name that it's a _little_ mermaid.” Hjalti shrugged, as if to ask Reynir what he had expected.

Icelanders must not be the only people who could eke dregs of tourist attention out of things that objectively sucked. “True. Is there anywhere we can go inside? I'm kind of freezing in these jorts…”  
  
At least it used up the day, shortening the time before he could see Mikkel again. When Hjalti heard the district Mikkel had suggested he and Reynir meet in, his eyebrows rose a little before falling again with his resigned sigh. “I suppose everyone wants to at least _see_ Christiania. Try not to catch any fleas while you’re there, I guess? It’s a Thursday afternoon, I guess it won’t be too bad.”   
  
Apparently Mikkel had been more or less of the same mind. Reynir entered the place still clutching his handwritten directions in one hand, finding Mikkel comfortably lounging in a fraying woven chair by a corner table. “Yeah, I mean, it’s a coffee shop like any other in Copenhagen, just one where nobody will stop you doing… well, for example, that.” Mikkel tilted his head towards the man rolling an enormous and obvious joint at the only other occupied table. “Everyone has some kind of opinion on Christiania, I thought it’d be fun for you to be able to tell everyone back on the farm about it first hand.”   
  
“My brother Bjarni is convinced it’s an _experiment in utopia_ , and my mum thinks you’d get hepatitis from breathing the air.” Reynir took in in the ambience, which was indeed markedly different to the sensible-dads-in-nice-jumpers vibe most of Copenhagen seemed to have, but still definitely not as wild as half the places he’d seen this summer. “I guess by now I’m not surprised to find it’s neither.”   
  
“Quite.”   
  
“I _do_ talk to people besides other farmers, you know. At home.”   
  
“I _do_  in fact remember what it’s like to be a farmer’s son, _you know, at home_.”   
  
Reynir leaned forward, propping his elbows on the table and smiling. It was nice when Mikkel was clearly feeling chatty, and even nicer to understand what ‘feeling chatty’ looked like from him. His good mood seemed to continue for the next several hours. Getting to talk to Mikkel idly, one-on-one, was always such a emotional rollercoaster. Every joke seemed to hint at something hugely important. When Mikkel made yet another self-deprecating aside, Reynir stopped just short of vehemently disagreeing with him. It was so hard to balance the desire to keep Mikkel in a good mood with Reynir’s ever-growing feeling that there was something quite terribly sad at the core of how he behaved, something he should be finding a way to address.   
  
Mikkel went off on a tangent, and Reynir zoned out a little, wondering if there were many people in Mikkel’s life that he really got to talk to. Were most of his friends like Sigrun, good fun but not nearly sensitive enough to his feelings? It seemed likely to Reynir, and thus likely that the connection they had could be just as important to Mikkel as it was to him. He got so lost in the fantasy of Mikkel finally really opening up to him that he totally missed the end of Mikkel’s story, only coming back to reality when Mikkel waved a hand in front of his face. “Reynir? Is your blood sugar getting low or something? You seem a bit out of it.”   
  
Reynir took a few moments to even parse what had been said. “Oh! Do you want me to get a cookie or something?” He had thankfully acquired some change from his cousin, and borrowing from his family felt drastically less bad than taking it from strangers.   
  
“Just be careful which kind you buy, in this place!”   
  
As their date ended, Mikkel paused on the way out to ask “Do you actually have a ride to the harbour tomorrow?”   
  
“... I didn’t think about that, actually.”   
  
“Does your cousin drive?”   
  
“I mean, I’m sure he _can_ , but - ”   
  
“I can take you to the harbour, if you want. I can borrow a friend’s car pretty much whenever.”   
  
“Oh! I, um, that would be really nice of you!”   
  
Reynir promised to meet Mikkel tomorrow at the same place he’d last dropped him off. Arriving back at Hjalti’s place, Reynir wondered how he’d handle the last few hours with the man who he’d now been following around for about a month. The thought entered his head that maybe this ending wasn’t inevitable, and he sat with that thought all evening, quiet and anxiously contemplative enough for Hjalti to wonder out loud if Reynir was catching cold.  


	21. Who Treats You Right?

Roads starting to feel shorter and shorter seemed to be the theme of Reynir’s week.    
  
“It feels weird to drive now without Sigrun singing along to power metal.” Reynir was enjoying riding shotgun, the chance to actually chat to Mikkel as nice as ever. It made the time go so quickly though, and now they must be barely ten minutes from the harbour. “What is this ‘not fearing for my life’ feeling?”   
  
That got a genuine laugh out of Mikkel. Thank goodness, because Reynir had a serious chat planned for the moment this car stopped moving, and Mikkel feeling receptive was going to be essential. As they turned one corner, Reynir thought he got a glimpse of the sea over a less-covered field. Even if the anxiety about how to phrase his upcoming declaration was nearly all-consuming, no panic or sadness could totally spoil the sight of open water after a couple of weeks without it. He should really take it in as much as he could now, because if everything went right here, his planned near-week of sea travel was never going to actually happen.    
  
Mikkel opened the back door of the borrowed car as if looking for something, then shook his head. “Of course, you don’t actually have any luggage. Silly me.” Straightening up, he turned to Reynir. “So, I think you just go through there, and hopefully your ticket won’t be too battered to read. It’s nearly impossible to get lost in this kind of place, they get a lot of American tourists so they have to idiot-proof it.”    
  
Reynir took a deep breath, and managed to say the words he'd been rehearsing for the whole drive there. “What if I don’t go?”   
  
“Hm?” Mikkel seemed puzzled.    
  
“Um.” Reynir folded his arms tightly over his chest, partly to stave off the feeling of the Baltic wind on his under-clad body, partly to steady himself for this explanation. “So, I feel like… like… I don’t really want to go home? I could stay with you. For another week, or two, or, um, longer?”   
  
“Did you not say you had to go home well before the sheep-gathering at the end of the summer?” Reynir had really been hoping Mikkel would be feeling some relief at what he said, but the dominant reaction continued to be puzzlement. Oh, no.    
  
“Um. Well.” Reynir shifted again. “That would be assuming I um, am planning to keep doing what I was doing before this summer?”   
  
Mikkel’s eyebrows slowly rose.   
  
“You know, Mikkel, following you around has been really - I’ve learned a lot of important stuff, and I don’t - I think I don’t want to leave you.”   
  
“Oh, Christ.” Mikkel closed his eyes.    
  
“I think we really have something special! And I’ve thought about it, and I feel like - I feel like you’re really good for me, so maybe - maybe you can keep me for a while, and let me be good for you?” Reynir smiled shakily, feeling like maybe he’d expressed himself decently in that final sentence. He’d said what he meant, and meant what he said.    
  
His smile became shakier, then faded totally, as he watched Mikkel blink at him for several long moments. That was not an expression that spoke of fresh-kindled love being given permission to grow. Not at all. Maybe he was considering what to say. When he finally did say something, it was put with a deliberateness that made Reynir feel like heavy stones were being carefully arranged on his chest. 

“Reynir.” Mikkel briefly pinched the bridge of his nose in a way that was almost cartoonish, then let his hand flop by his side. “Look. Going on an unplanned European tour, doing a bunch of drugs and banging some 34-year-old unemployed trucker you barely know is a totally acceptable thing to be doing at 20.  _ Shacking up with _ the 34-year-old unemployed trucker you barely know and wrecking your life plans is  _ absolutely  _ not the same.” He gestured in the air. “I signed up to show you a nice time, not fuck up your life, and I thought you had some idea there's a difference. If you’d  _ said _ something earlier…”   
  
Reynir’s jaw flapped uselessly for a few seconds, his emotions riding some kind of asymmetrical see-saw between offence, confused hurt, and plain sadness about how Mikkel described himself. “You’re not ‘some 34-year-old unemployed trucker’, you’re, you’re - I care about you! And we can make it work! We could um, we both know about farming, and we’ve worked together before, and we could… move… I can plan stuff, I’m not some kind of, of - ”    
  
Before he could finish his claim that he wasn’t some kind of useless baby, Reynir’s stammering was cut off by him starting to cry. Mikkel standing there, looking quite lost for the first time in Reynir’s experience, then sliding his hand down his face in frustration made it so much worse. If Reynir hadn’t apparently pre-ruined everything, he’d absolutely have ruined it now. People were trying not to be obvious about staring at them, but failing miserably. He was pretty sure he caught enough of some Danish child’s question to understand they meant “Why is the man with tiny pants crying?”. And still Mikkel was just standing there, displaying nothing but bafflement at the sight of Reynir going to pieces in the ferry car park.    
  
“Do you need a drink of water?” Mikkel offered Reynir a bottle, as if this was some injury he just needed to apply a band-aid to, which only made the crying worse. Through the sniffles, Reynir tried to respond.    
  
“Maybe.” Reynir really thought he’d already reached the peak of feeling like an idiot before, but apparently not. The way Mikkel was framing this made so much sense now he’d heard it, and that was the worst part. “Oh, my God. I’m really sorry. I’m so stupid.”   
  
Mikkel managed to hold back rolling his eyes, at least. “Well, it happens to all of us. Look, you’re getting on that boat, alright?”   
  
“I could be so good for you! You’re not saying anything about how you feel, you don’t have to try to protect me - ” Reynir blurted out, then slapped his hand over his mouth. Mikkel sighed again, looked at the time on his phone, then started fishing around in his pockets.    
  
“You need to start going towards that boat now.” He found a tiny bit of paper and the stub of a pencil. “Look, here’s my email address. Let me know you got home alright, okay?”   
  
Reynir took the note - spidery, but legible - and stuffed it into his jorts pocket. Wiping his nose, he spoke in a croak that came out horribly unintentionally dramatic. “Okay.”   
  
“I’m sorry I let this happen.”   
  
“Don’t!” Reynir’s lip trembled with a fresh bout of tears starting. Mikkel exuding near-ambivalent calm in the face of this, and then apologising, felt like the worst possible slap in the face.   
  
The waiting room was just slightly too cold, and smelled of furniture that a few hundred too many people had farted on. Reynir went through the process of boarding the ferry robotically, it being all he could do to not to set off another flood of tears in front of all these people. The journey home was inevitably long and lonely, and still included that tediously long stop in Torshavn. He was already afraid of what it would be like, feeling like this and having to interact with Faroese people on top of it. Perhaps a sheep would eat him and put him out of his misery. He could only hope.    
  
*******   
  
To Reynir's deep shame, he cried every day on the boat home, then also a little bit on the bus home, and then a bit more once his mum had finished her “talk” about his idiot behaviour and let him go up to his room. He still told Bjarni about it though, because despite it being his advice that had technically led to all of this, it still felt wrong not to talk to him about everything.    
  
“Oh. Dude, it really blows that you’re all like, sad.” Bjarni had taken Reynir into the nearest town and bought them both fish and chips. His attempted consolation, heartfelt as ever, came through a mouthful of potato. “Okay though, does this mean you’re like, bi now?”    
  
Reynir knew logically that these fish fillets were usually delicious. It felt deeply tragic that he’d become so sad even they tasted of nothing, and he poked them with a listlessness he hadn't known was possible. “I guess.”   
  
Bjarni knocked half his chips out of his lap as he punched the air. “Hell yeah bro! Dual wielding! It’s the only way!” He was so loud that despite his feet being suddenly surrounded by chips, the seagulls were scattering away from him in alarm. Reynir just sighed again rather than meeting the attempted high-five, and Bjarni squished his eyebrows together in the way he always did when he was trying to think really, really hard. “So he like… fucked really good, and took you back to the harbour to get your boat, and then was just like ‘good luck man’. What’s the like… bad part?”   
  
“He dumped me?”   
  
Bjarni’s expression was exactly how Reynir would have personified the sound of an ancient hard drive screaming from overwork. “So he told you that he was like, your boyfriend? Yikes.”   
  
“Well, no, I guess.”   
  
“Okay.” Bjarni seemed quite worried. “I don’t get it. Did something else happen?”   
  
Reynir moved his chips around in their styrofoam container. “I don’t know. It felt important. But it wasn’t, apparently.”   
  
Bjarni made a noise of sympathy that, while still clearly mixed with deep confusion, was something Reynir appreciated. “Well, we gotta cheer you up somehow, even if you don’t wanna say what the problem is. You’re like a sad puppy right now.”   
  
“Please find literally any other way to phrase that.”   
  
“We can find you another dude! I promise there’s other good dick in the world!”   
  
“Ugh.”   
  
“No, really. Fully half of people have them! It was a nice surprise for me too.”    
  
Reynir snorted. It felt kind of unnatural to laugh, but it was enough to make Bjarni beam at his success, clapping Reynir on the shoulder with all of his signature enthusiasm. “Look. Come to Reykjavik with me this weekend. The tourist season’s nearly over, so it won’t be so bad.”    
  
“Mum will kill me if I go anywhere before I finish all the stuff I forgot about for a month.”    
  
“Next weekend then.”   
  
“Maybe.”   
  
“No, you’re coming. Okay?”   
  
Reynir probably needed to save this fighting energy for some of his many remaining chores. “Fine.”   
  
Talking to Bjarni did make the sea air feel a bit more fresh than harsh, and the drive back around the fjord a little more beautiful than merely difficult and treacherous. By the time they returned to the farm, Reynir felt almost ready to take up Bjarni's offer. Not all of his chores felt like the worst thing ever, and getting ready to see returning volunteers for the sheep roundup was actually kind of nice. The long, bright nights would turn to mist on the mountainside soon, and Reynir felt a little bit like he was in place again.   
  
Bjarni ended up dragging Reynir to see some heavy metal band. Reynir felt at first like more loud music was the last thing he needed. The band being named after the sword age was so reminiscent of Sigrun’s loud taste it brought him right back, and when Bjarni ran into the three members he knew personally at the merch table, he proceeded to tell them all about what a terrible time Reynir was having. All three of them group-hugged him. It was unexpected, but made seeing them on stage just that bit more heartwarming. In the middle of a crowd singing along with that much joy, it was impossible to feel like things would suck forever, and Bjarni beamed when he found Reynir again sweaty and smiling. 


	22. Epilogue / Life Lovers

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> God, it feels weird but good to finally finish this!
> 
> This chapter technically contains some spoilers for Under Pressure, but probably nothing that ruins the story terribly.

Reynir kept the email address Mikkel had written out for him. The guilt over never actually writing to him to say he’d gotten home grew for several weeks, never quite big enough to push through Reynir’s desire to just forget about it, then faded into the background. Reynir recycled his jorts into patches for longer jeans, and helped chase the sheep down from the mountains in the autumn, and started to feel a bit like the whole summer had been a strange dream.  
  
“Do you still want this?” Reynir’s mum found it on a table while tidying up. “Mikkel dot Madsen, is that the guy from that horrible cannibal show Hildur likes?”  
  
“You’re thinking of Mads Mikkelsen, Mum. Um, yeah, I should really write to him, though. The guy with the email address, I mean, not Mads Mikkelsen...”  
  
Reynir really wasn’t sure what he expected when he finally wrote an email and sent it off. He had drafted it several times, first apologetic and emotive, then almost clinically brief, then something in between. The response was definitely somewhat more on the clinical end, but if Mikkel was irritated by having to wait to know Reynir had made it home, he didn’t show it. Reynir went back and forth for a few days on whether or not to continue the chain of replies, reluctant to bother and inconvenience Mikkel even more but still not really convinced he’d been wrong about Mikkel needing more caring friends. He replied with a set of normal life updates, and got the same back.  
  
The year crept on, and ended with the usual fires and explosions to send the Yule Lads back whence they came. He danced to _Call me Maybe_ yet again at his sister’s New Year party, and only felt a little bit sad about it.  
  
Slight stiltedness in their emails gave way to conversational updates and replies, sometimes days apart, sometimes a month or two apart. Slowly, Reynir began to understand that he had misunderstood Mikkel in some important ways, while being totally correct in others. Mikkel had many friends of every type, but there were some things that just having a good enough listening ear really couldn’t cure. Over a year into their strange and patchy friendship, Reynir finally got enough information to put two and two together regarding Mikkel’s long-ago request that Reynir never get a motorbike, and a lot of things made far too much sense.  
  
He was always going to be Mikkel, though. There was no use just telling him that survivor’s guilt didn’t have to be part of his personality forever. He had his own method of getting through it, and he was a smart guy. It felt kind of peaceful for Reynir to realise exactly what the nature of his mistake had been two summers ago. He told Mikkel this, and got mostly fond mirth in return, followed by a long bullet-point list of landlord issues to watch out for when he moved to Reykjavik. Reynir had an inkling that the immediate shift to giving advice was more of Mikkel’s self-defence. There was no point prodding it too much right away, though. Mikkel was pretty busy with his and Sigrun's new business venture, and Reynir was sure it would be very good for the both of them. Besides that, he was Reynir's friend, and going nowhere. The insecure urgency Reynir had felt when he'd last seen him in person now just felt like proof of how little he'd really known him. 

Moving to Reykjavik took a long time to organise. The farm branching out into some tourist work became more and more inevitable, and finding a place in Reykjavik became more and more difficult, and time ticked on in the way it did when one was incredibly busy. He held onto the idea that he should experience living in town though, just for a while. When 2016's spring was finally showing signs of actually happening, one of Bjarni’s housemates moved to Norway. Reynir was not thinking at all about the summer of 2012 when he finally finished moving all his stuff into his new room, sat down in Bjarni's - now his - kitchen, and heard the _ding!_ of his phone telling him he had a Facebook message.  
  
It took him a moment to even recognise the name “Tuuri Hotakainen”, but he’d clearly added her at some point. Tapping her picture, he squinted at her face for a while, then the memory came back to him rolled up in the taste of Spanish tapas and the feel of sunburn on his arms. _Oh, hi! Yeah, you did indeed buy me lunch once in 2012, fancy hearing from you again!_  
  
He wasn’t entirely sure how he ended up agreeing to show her around Reykjavik, but a promise was a promise, and a few months later he had a diminutive Finnish woman in his kitchen. Her hair was less bright than the last time Reynir had met her, now a deep purple that barely showed up indoors, and the sundress had been exchanged for warm leggings and an oversized jumper. Shooing Bjarni away from her and reminding him that the “no tourists” rule still applied even if said tourist had one Icelandic acquaintance, Reynir made her coffee, unsure how to really start the conversation with someone he knew so little about. Thankfully, she introduced topic after topic with a confidence that almost seemed like she'd pre-prepared them, and the first hour of planning things to do passed so quickly Reynir didn’t notice his coffee going cold. 

“I don’t really know what your budget is, but if you have a bit to spare, I guess most people like the aurora centre? Maybe less fun for you, given you get it in Finland already - I think? How far south do you live?” Reynir took a big gulp of his mostly-cream drink, trying to get it out of the way so he could make another warmer one.  
  
“We're not _super_ north - and we’re doing surprisingly well for budget, actually! That YouTube money has changed a lot!”  
  
“YouTube money?” Reynir had vaguely tried to follow Tuuri’s posts in anticipation of meeting her again, but had seen nothing about her having a channel. "I had no idea you were YouTube famous."  
  
“Um, well. It’s my brother's. He’s sort of here with me, actually, he just didn’t want to come meet someone after already travelling all morning…”  
  
Reynir thought he had a vague mental image of Tuuri’s brother, gleaned from the odd picture of hers where an awkward ash-blond man had been visible in the background. “The ‘camo cargo pants and camo fanny pack together’ guy?”  
  
“...Yes.”  
  
“I see. Is it like…” Reynir struggled to recall what it was that Finnish people usually did and put up videos of. “Hockey?”  
  
“Crushing random items, I don't know why people like watching it, to be honest. He has this, um - hydraulic press.” She pronounced the word _hydraulic_ in the most carefully correct way Reynir had ever heard.  
  
“Oh _that_ channel, Bjarni loves that one! Oh, gosh, I had no idea you were related! You two sure seem... different to each other!"   
  
Tuuri sighed. “Yeah, I know." She imitated the way her brother said _hydraulic press_ with a brief expression of despair. "I guess I can’t deny it’s helped our situation. And Onni - my brother - he did come here saying he’d try some new stuff, and it’s the reason we can go on holiday - I _do_ want to say the whole monetised crushing wasn’t my idea, though.”  
  
“Is your um, your cousin, is he involved with it? One of the guys I met was your cousin, right? Luulli?”  
  
“ _Lalli_ \- oh yes, you did meet him and Emil, didn’t you? And yeah...”  
  
“They were a funny pair.”  
  
“They’re _still_ being a funny pair.”  
  
“Oh, geez, seriously?”  
  
Tuuri got her phone out. “Somehow, yes! Here’s a picture from the last costume party I went to…”  
  
Reynir made appropriately entertained noises at the image of them all dressed up together. Emil seemed to have committed to the crop top and red wig with much more enthusiasm than Tuuri had to her blue wig, but the red R shirts still made it very obvious who they were both meant to be. “How did you get Lalli into the white face paint and cat ears? He doesn’t seem the type. From what I remember, anyway.” Reynir vaguely recalled that most of his interaction with Lalli had been spent with Lalli half-asleep or high. Hopefully he was doing a bit better now. Tuuri flipped forward a couple of spaces in the photo album, and Reynir caught a glimpse of the pair again. Emil now dressed in that typically Swedish way that walked a precarious line between “fuckboy hipster” and “gay signalling”, while Lalli looked nearly identical to the way he had four years before. Before Reynir could really work out what kind of adventure Lalli, Emil, and Emil’s manbun were on here, Tuuri snapped her phone cover shut.  
  
“I mean, well, he isn’t the type. Emil was helping him scrub it all off about two minutes after we took this.” Tuuri stretched. “So, um, is there anything you’d recommend us going to tonight?”  
  
“I was going to say that drag karaoke is free entry at Gaukerinn. But I’m not sure it would be your brother’s thing...”  
  
Tuuri perked up very visibly. “It sounds amazing though! Screw ‘not his thing’, he promised me he’d do new stuff!” She began to stuff her things into her bag. “Lemme just use your bathroom - if that’s okay? - and then take me to the noodle place you mentioned. I’ll pay. Then, drag karaoke. Deal?”  
  
Reynir supposed he hadn’t had real plans tonight. Tuuri was fun. He might as well take her to drag karaoke, and get to dress up in something other than his lopapeysa and jeans for once. He had an adorable choker necklace to try out. “Okay! Deal!”


End file.
